*m 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf^GJ'3 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




JOHN B. GOUGH. 



A KNIGHT 



THAT 



SMOTE THE DRAGON 



OR 



THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S GOUGH 



BY 



s 



EDWARD A. RAND 

AUTHOR OF 

Deeds Worth Telling, A rt Series, Under the Lantern at Black Rocks, 

The Drummer-Boy of the Rappahannock, Sailor-Boy Bob, 

When the War Broke Out, Look Ahead Series, 

School and Camp Series, Margie 

at the Harbor Light, etc. 




A. 



i 

1< 



NEW YORK: HUNT & EA TON 
CINCINNATI : CRANSTON & STOWE 






Copyright, 1892, by 
HUNT & EATON, 

New York. 



JZ- 3 



7fjf 



PREFACE. 

» 

THE late John B. Gough, the great temper- 
ance orator of his day, told in a little volume 
(1845) the story of his youth, his descent into 
the midnight depths of intemperance, and his 
painful ascent into liberty and the light again. 
The details of his subsequent life have been given 
in other volumes, but that first little book of 1845 
holds for the most part the facts that I specially 
wish to emphasize for the sake of our young 
people. These facts make a glass through which 
we can look back and see what unmade Gough 
and then made him. Here we find the warning 
against wrong and the spur to reformation. I 
would add that in a fitting memorial issued by 
the National Temperance Society, that noble or- 
ganization, I found a helpful summary of facts 
and addresses from which I have been kindly 
allowed to quote. The life of Gough gives a 
summons to all to move upon that beastly, cruel 
enemy, Drink. If under the Dragon's foot to- 
day, let not any despair. In the strength of God, 
may they rise like Gough and deal that wound 
of death which will be the healing of their own 
hurt! 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. page 

"Where was He Born ? 7 

CHAPTER II. 
Still a Boy 15 

CHAPTER III. 
The World Before Him 26 

CHAPTER IV. 
A Home on a Farm 31 

CHAPTER V. 
Alone in New York 35 

CHAPTER YI. 
Mother in America 43 

CHAPTER VII. 
Mother Gone 49 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Going Down 55 

CHAPTER IX. 
Down Deeper 67 



6 Contents. 

CHAPTER X. P AGE 

Rays of Light, then Darkness 77 

CHAPTER XI. 
In Still Darker Depths. 85 

CHAPTER XII. 
A Friendly Hand 101 

CHAPTER XIII. 
A Knight Created 115 

CHAPTER XIY. 
A Fallen Knight 125 

CHAPTER XY. 
Lance in Rest Again 129 

CHAPTER XYI. 
Going to Hear Gough 137 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Across the Seas .' 156 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
An Attack on England's Dragon 170 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Sunset-time 185 



A KNIGHT THAT SMOTE THE DRAGON; 

OR, 

THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S GOUGH. 

— +♦» 

CHAPTEE I. 

WHERE WAS HE BORN? 

DO you use an atlas much ? One advantage is 
this — it makes traveling very cheap. If 
you keep your atlas within reaching-distance, it 
is like a locomotive and cars ever waiting at 
your door, the steam up and fizzing, the train 
ready at your bidding to take you wherever you 
say. In the present case, as we wish to go across 
the water, a train of cars will not serve us. We 
must therefore use wings. Our atlas resting on 
the shelf shall become a pair of wings. This very 
moment they shall be attached to our shoulders 
and we will fly away — to Europe. Here we are, 
without any fuss, without any expense, off Land's 
End, England, and flying up the English Chan- 
nel. One second more and we are in the Strait 



8 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

of Dover. Now look off upon the coast of Kent, 
where the big bulging cliffs seem very much like 
huge fists doubled up and defiantly held out 
toward all the continent and France in particu- 
lar. We look along the white, foam-fringed 
coast. Deal ? That is not the place we w T ant. 
Dover? Folkstone? No. Sandgate? Yes. It 
is an attractive watering-place for puffing, pant- 
ing Englishmen who hurry out of the cities in 
the warm summer-time; and some of them 
doubtless make a great stir when they arrive. 
One August day, the 22d, far back in the 
year 1817, there came to Sandgate a very im- 
portant personage, judging by the amount of 
bustle and stir in one house. This individual 
was a baby. It was a brave soldier's baby. The 
name given to him was that of John Bartholo- 
mew Gough. The cradle rocked a soul whose 
baby-cry was one day destined to develop 
into the eloquent voice that w r ould echo up and 
down the land, warning men against intemper- 
ance and winning them to a life of abstinence, 
joy, and thrift. 

It is always of interest in the early life of men 
and women to ascertain what circumstances 
helped make them. Here at Sandgate was a 



Where was He Born? 9 

child destined to move big England and still 
bigger America. What helped make the sol- 
dier's boy running about Sandgate's old-fashioned 
streets a child among the children trooping 
eveiy-where %. Was there any thing of remark- 
able interest in his character and life? Lively, 
enthusiastic, fond of fun, what was there of par- 
ticular note in the boy himself or his surround- 
ings ? I emphasize this point because our early 
life points forward to our manhood or woman- 
hood. There was something in John Gough's 
home and surroundings looking toward the fut- 
ure and uttering its prophecy. 

There are peculiarities of your present life that 
w T ill make useful material to be worked up into 
an honorable and effective future. What about 
the Sandgate boy down by the sea? He had a 
very sensitive temperament and a keen imagina- 
tion, and I can see how powerful in their influ- 
ence must have been certain conditions of his 
childhood. There was the sea, vast, mysterious, 
ever shouting on the beach its great chorus of 
unrest. John Gough would go to the beach and 
there watch this vast, fascinating, restless sea. 
When he was a man speaking to and swaying 
great audiences he could go in thought to the 



10 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

sea-shore and find in those great, stretching waters 
the material for a vivid illustration, or recall a 
story told by some bronzed old seaman. 

The shores of the English Channel have seen 
many wrecks. A famous one was that of the 
Royal George, a British man-of-war, that sud- 
denly sank in Portsmouth harbor in the year 
1782. In those days when they wished to make 
repairs on the lower part of a vessel's hull the 
custom was to " heel her over." This meant to 
throw her over on one side, and it was a del- 
icate operation. Alas! the Royal George re- 
ceived too much of a tip. The water flowed into 
the port-holes of the side thus borne down, and 
she quickly sank. At the time she had on board 
eleven hundred people, and of these three hun- 
dred were women and children. The greater 
number of this living cargo of the Royal George 
found a silent, shadowy grave in Portsmouth 
harbor. This accident sent a shiver of horror 
all through England, and the poet Cowper, when 
he heard the news, wrote lines that you must 
have already read : 

"Toll for the brave! 

The brave that are no more ! 
All sunk beneath the wave, 

Fast by their native shore! 



Where was He Born? 11 

" Eight hundred of the brave, 
Whose courage well was tried, 

Had made the vessel heel, 
And laid her on her side. 

11 A land breeze shook the shrouds, 

And she was overset ; 
Down went the Royal George, 

With all her crew complete. 

"Toll for the brave! 

Brave Kempenfelt is gone ; 
His last sea-fight is fought, 

His work of glory done." 

These and the remaining lines I fancy that I 
can hear John Gough reading in the school of 
his boyhood, not far from those waters of the 
Channel covering so many hopes that would 
never live and bloom again. The sea fringed 
the boy's life with an element of the tragic and 
awful. It kept alive and developed within him 
the sense of the abrupt and venturous. It 
aroused the quality of the heroic when the saving 
of life at sea was the supreme question of the 
hour. Any time, by day or night, the great 
ocean might have a caprice of wrath, and a 
wreck might turn half a dozen prosy Sandgaters 
into half a dozen magnificent heroes. 

Then there was an old castle in Sandgate. It 
was built by King Henry the Eighth. Among 



12 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

those who had visited it were foremost people 
of England. John knew the keeper of the old 
castle, and was allowed to ramble about it when- 
ever he pleased. There he goes, stealing through 
a rough gate-way, slipping down a shadowy 
court-yard, or ascending the castle wall and 
peering out among the openings in some battle- 
ment. As he went through the stern old gate- 
way he may have thought what gay cavaliers 
once rode where he walked. Up on the castle 
wall, he may have wondered if Queen Bess stood 
there and looked off across the sea to catch a 
glimpse of any hostile vessel from Spain. In 
some chamber or hall he may have fancied 
Henry the Eighth laughing and jesting with a 
knot of courtiers, or he saw the king riding out 
over the drawbridge and heard the hoofs of the 
horses of his body-guard pounding out a rough, 
energetic tune of war. Would the boy, filling 
up the empty air with pictures of brave knights, 
ever be himself God's knight in a holy cause ? 
We shall see. The old castle had its influence. 

A person who fostered, perhaps unconsciously, 
the soldierly, combative element in the boy was 
his father, that old soldier who had heard the 
loud, echoing guns of Corunna and Talavera, 



Where was He Born? 13 

Salamanca and Badajos, Pombal and Busaco. 
John would deck himself with pieces of the old 
soldier's equipments, seize and shoulder a broom- 
stick, and then his father would drill him. 
What boy or girl has not read Charles Wolfe's 
spirited lines describing the Burial of Sir John 
Moore ? 

" Xot a drum was heard, nor a funeral note, 
As his corse to the rampart we hurried ; 

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot 
O'er the grave where our hero we buried." 

Moore commanded at the ever- famous engage- 
ment of Corunna, a sea-port in Spain, where, 
with about fourteen thousand men, he beat back 
twenty thousand French under Soult, who tried 
to stop the embarkation of the English. Moore 
won victory and — death. Hurriedly he was 
buried on a bastion by the shore. The poet 
says : 

" We buried him darkly at dead of night, 
The sods with our bayonets turning ; 

By the struggling: moonbeam's misty light, 
And the lantern dimly burning." 

The poetry has become celebrated. Its very 
movement suggests the tramp, tramp of march- 
ing men, going out in the night to do some sad 
work of war. Gough's father was under Moore, 



14 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

and saw his brave but helpless commander borne 
away from the fight. He told his boy about 
that death and the dark, lonely burial of the sol- 
dier-hero, and the boy's flashing eyes proved how 
interested and excited a listener the veteran had. 
The latter did not know in what holv battle that 
boy would one day engage. 




Still a Boy. 15 



CHAPTER II. 

STILL A BOY. 

IN finding out the influences that in early life 
tend to shape character we must not fail to 
count in "father" and "mother." John 
Gough's father, the grave veteran, was arousing 
within the boy a daring, combative element. 
John Gough's mother was just a warm-hearted, 
loving woman. Intellectually she must have gone 
ahead of many in her walk in life. For twenty 
years she was the village " school-marm." She 
was a stimulating force in the boy's mental cult- 
ure. John was not to be limited to the op- 
portunities that Sandgate could afford. He was 
sent to a " seminary " at Folkstone. He went 
forward so rapidly in his studies that he was 
admitted to the rank of instructor ! This vener- 
able pedagogue was asked to instruct two classes. 
One he guided beyond that difficult place in 
the rugged way of learning, a knowledge of the 
science of spelling words of two syllables ! To 
another and more experienced set of travelers 



16 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

he taught the "Kule of Three!" He did not 
himself advance very far in his studies, for at 
the age of ten he quit school, and forever. That 
was a small pack of knowledge which he took 
away for life's travels, the scanty accumulations 
up to the age of ten ! We can make no more 
serious mistake than to go out into life with a 
slender pack of knowledge. Yes, worse still is 
the disposition to be content with our small 
stores and never to add to them. John Gough 
saw his need, painfully felt it, in after years. 
Doubtless if he had been other than a poor 
boy he would have been kept at school. The 
"seminary" at Folkstone burdened John 
Gough's father with an expense his weak pocket- 
book could not easily carry. Poor ? Yes. the 
Goughs were poor. That wolf, poverty, left 
some deep scars on the little family circle. Once 
their need was very great. The wolf I have 
mentioned was snarling more threateningly than 
ever. John's mother was not only " school- 
ma'am," but lace-maker also. Once when the 
wolf was scratching at the door, and money must 
be had somehow, the mother walked over eight 
miles to Dover, taking her lace with her. She 
patiently, wearily tried to find a customer, but 



Still a Boy. 17 

sad, hungry, tired, she was compelled after an 
unsuccessful day to return home. Seventeen 
miles for nothing ! Seventeen miles for worse 
than nothing, bringing back a sharp hunger, weary 
feet, and an aching heart. That was the very 
day that John happened to come home rich and 
happy as five shillings and sixpence can make a 
poor boy. It was money that had been presented 
to him after an exhibition of his skill in 
reading. He found his mother crying sadly. 
She told him how unsuccessful she had been, 
when to her astonishment he pulled out his treas- 
ures and gave them to her. The now happy 
mother fell upon her knees, John falling with 
her, and her soul was like a fountain running 
over with thankfulness to God. 

I have been looking at the surroundings of the 
boy-life in Sandgate to see if any of them could 
have been sources of power, and so have given 
strength to coming years. I have spoken of the 
poverty of the Goughs. It may sound like a 
contradiction to say that want can be the source 
of affluence, and yet because John Bartholomew 
Gough was once a poor boy it gave him in after 
years the ability to reach down to the poor, to feel 

for them, to understand them and be a blessing to 
2 



18 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

them. Charles Dickens, the famous author, was 
once a poor boy. He is described, at one point 
of his life in London, as " carrying things to the 
pawn-brokers, visiting his father in the Marshal- 
sea " (a kind of prison), " into which the poor 
man and his family soon drifted, tying up pots 
of blacking at the warehouse, prowling about 
cook-shops, alamode beef-shops, and coffee- 
shops, a shabbily clad and insufficiently fed little 
boy." It has been shown how this experience 
was fitting Dickens for his work. Poverty, 
then, may be riches. If you are poor, don't say 
it is a valueless experience. Don't throw it away 
as the part of your life which is an empty ves- 
sel. It may hold rich treasure. I have called 
poverty a wolf that scarred. Behind the scars, 
though, may be any thing but a wolf's teeth. I 
only label it " wolf" because poverty may seem 
so at the time. It hurts just then, and yet in 
later years, looking back upon the hurt, we may 
interpret it differently. It may be the spur to 
a noble effort. Marryatt says, " A smooth sea 
never made a skilled mariner, neither do unin- 
terrupted prosperity and success qualify for use- 
fulness and happiness. The storms of adversity, 
like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties and 



Still a Boy. 19 

excite the invention, prudence, skill, and forti- 
tude of the voyager." You may look back upon 
want and see in it a motive-power urging you 
on to success, and thank God for it. 

When we look back at the boy-life of Gough, 
as he stands there on Sandgate beach, soon to em- 
bark on life's perilous voyage, you will not find 
his chest rich in its outfit of worldly goods. 
Poor boys' chests, though, may become rich 
men's coffers. But, in examining the peculiar 
conditions of young Gough's life, in turning up 
the soil into which it thrust its roots, let us not 
overlook that element of prayer contributed to 
it by John Gough's parents. In his younger 
days lie could not appreciate the value of that 
prayerful example, but it had its worth. It en- 
tered as an unconscious influence into his char- 
acter. Especially did his mother, a woman of 
warm, sincere trust in God, stamp deep upon her 
boy's mind the lesson of our spiritual need and 
prayer's power. From such a fountain-head of 
influence as I have mentioned, that venturous- 
ness and daring which a life by the sea and 
amid the old historic traditions of Sandgate 
Castle would naturally provoke, that aggressive- 
ness and courage aroused by his father's career 



20 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

as a soldier, that sympathy for the hungry and 
needy that our hunger and need are sure to 
quicken — what kind of a character would be 
likely to issue ? Would it not be a life feeling 
for those oppressed by any evil, and likely to 
ride upon and fight the evil out of the way ? 
In such a fight would not the child of praying 
parents be likely to reach up and take hold of 
God's hand ? We shall see. 

But, while it is interesting to trace a life to 
its start and notice what helped give it a set 
and flow, it is interesting to hunt for any youth- 
ful sign of that future greatness. Young peo- 
ple do not understand that their early days carry 
the bud of the flower they may give to the world 
in the future. Some one remarked of an ac- 
quaintance that in his college-life there were the 
potency and promise of the man that he would 
make in after days. It was a distinguished man- 
hood thus developed. You know it not to-day, 
if still young, but there is something about you 
inevitably indicating what you will be by and 
by. There is some good bud on your branch, 
some fair promise in your life. It will be lam- 
entable if you make a mistake — if, by the frost 
of any careless living to-day you blight to-mor- 



Still a Boy. 21 

row's flower. What about that wide-aw r ake, im- 
pulsive, excitable boy, John Gough, running 
about the streets of Sandgate? Did he have 
any mental gift that gave promise of power in 
after life ? Any one that ever heard Mr. Gough 
knows that he had unusual powers in the 
delineation of character. He showed this talent 
when a boy. We have seen or must have 
heard of that popular street-exhibition of Punch 
and Judy. It had its origin in Italy about the 
year 1600. It traveled to England, and was 
specially popular in Queen Anne's reign. If 
we ever saw Punch's long nose protruding from 
his show-box on any of our streets we can never 
forget the sight. John Gough was fascinated 
by the comical Punch. Out of a chair that was 
minus its bottom he made a Punch-and-Judy 
box. The same hands that contrived the box 
made a Punch and Judy for it. Then he would 
exhibit these wonders to the boys and girls, and 
with his power to mimic character he furnished 
an entertaining exhibition for his grinning, eager- 
eyed auditors. John had a sister, Mary. She 
would help him in other efforts of his imper- 
sonating genius. He turned a chair into a pul- 
pit. His sister manufactured an audience out 



22 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

of rag-dolls. Then, personating a clergyman, 
John would address his ragged congregation. 
In the possession of a power to express character, 
to forget that he was John Gough, and, enter- 
ing into another's feelings, become for a while 
that person, he was shadowing forth his far-away 
future life as a king of the platform. 

Not only in the above, but in reading also, he 
showed that he had a gift above the average. 
Go over to the wonderful seminary at Folkstone, 
where the boy-teacher has instructed his pupils 
and now takes his turn as scholar. He stands 
up in the reading-class. You hear his liquid, 
musical, sympathetic voice giving so easily the 
passing thought in the mind of the writer. In 
all this was readily suggested what he might ac- 
complish through his voice if cultivated. 

When very young he gained a reputation as 
a reader. Of those early days one pleasant 
memento was connected with the distinguished 
William Wilberforce. This foremost man is 
remembered in English history in connection 
with the abolition of the accursed slave-trade. 
Wilberforce was born in 1759. When a youth- 
ful student he sent a communication to a York 
paper in which he denounced the " odious traffic 



Still a Boy. 23 

in human flesh." At that early day lie was proph- 
esying what he might attempt in adult years. 
In 1788, though his health was poor, he conse- 
crated himself to an arduous work, and began a 
famous crusade against the slave-trade. Year 
after year this champion in Parliament fought in 
behalf of the slave. Finally, one day, Parlia- 
ment came round to his side and voted against 
the slave-trade. Sir Samuel Romilly, an ally of 
Wilberforce, in a speech before Parliament, con- 
trasted Napoleon, then in the full tide of success, 
and Wilberforce, who would " that day lay his 
head upon his pillow and remember that the slave- 
trade was no more." There was a breaking out 
into applause all over the house, and hearty cheers 
went up for the courageous Wilberforce. For 
weary years he had laid his head upon his pillow, 
as an unsuccessful crusader, nights enough to 
merit this sweet repose of victory. Wilberforce 
was not satisfied. He still leveled his lance at any 
outbreak of the slave-traffic, and he also aimed 
to rout slavery itself every-where under the 
British flag. No short fight, so much money was 
invested in slavery, and behind the money-bags 
was the greed of the human heart. He could not 
stay in Parliament to wage this fight, so broken was 



24 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

his health. He retired in 1825. Buxton, a good 
crusader, took up the light, and he was permitted 
to see the flag of this righteous cause triumphant. 
That was in July, 1833. What a protracted, 
persistent fight! Wilberforce died the 29th 
day of that month. Three days before he 
went home to his reward they brought him the 
good tidings that the Abolition Bill had passed 
a second reading. Grateful was Wilberforce. 
He lifted his soul in thanksgiving to God for the 
sacrifices that Englishmen had offered in behalf 
of this cause, twenty millions sterling having 
been spent. Let us now go back of this period. 
It was to Sandgate down by the cool sea that 
the aged Wilberforce was accustomed to come 
in summer, and John Gough went with his father 
to the house where Wilberforce was stopping 
and where a circle had gathered for prayer. 
Wilberforce noticed John. He gave the boy a 
book, and in it he wrote John's name. He asked 
John to read, which he did, and Wilberforce 
spoke very kindly of the performance. When 
Wilberforce laid his hand on that boy's head 
he did not know he was touching in silent bless- 
ing one who would conduct a glorious crusade 
against Drink's hard, cruel slavery. As the 



Still a Boy. 25 

months went on, John's reputation as a reader 
did not lessen. People in the street would stop 
to listen to him as he read to his mother sitting 
near the cottage door. Sometimes he would be 
sent for and requested to read. Once a gentle- 
man gave him five shillings for his acceptable 
reading. Another person laid a sixpence on top 
of that. It w^as this money that relieved the 
want of John's mother after her long, hard walk 
to Dover and back, in vain trying to sell her lace. 
But John Gough's boy-life was rapidly hurry- 
ing away. He loved fun, and it sometimes made 
him trouble. He was very quick to see the 
humorous side of any event. I can hear his voice 
ringing out in happy laughter, while his ready 
mimicry provokes others to a laughter as eager 
and careless. From May-day in the spring to 
Guy Fawkes' day in the autumn and then past 
the bright Christmas and Easter festivals to May- 
day again, he is just a fun-loving English boy. I 
catch the echoes of his Punch and Judy exhibi- 
tions, or he gives a very solemn address to Mary 
Gough's rag-dolls. As I listen, though, the 
liquid, musical notes are dying away, and soon 
will cease to sound in Sandgate by the sea. 



26 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 



CHAPTEK III. 

THE WORLD BEFORE HIM. 

THE ship Helen is drifting out of the Thames, 
bound for America. The wind swells her 
snowy sails. As they pull on the ropes the 
sailors' song echoes over the water. The captain 
energetically strides the deck and shouts his 
orders. There are passengers aboard, and they 
have crept out of the cabin and lean over the rails. 
But whose is that boy-face turned eagerly toward 
the sea? That is John Gough, bound for another 
continent. He is only twelve. That is an 
early age at which to gather up one's posses- 
sions, leave home, cross the sea, find a new 
world, and there begin life in earnest. It seems 
altogether too soon for the shutting down of the 
misty horizon-line upon the boy-life at Sandgate, 
on father, mother, and sister, the humble home, 
May-day, and Guy Fawkes's day. And yet 
there seemed no other way. 

The father had no easy task to obtain a chance 
for his boy to learn a trade. What then could 



The World Before Him. 27 

be done with John? That question must have 
occasioned anxiety in the Sandgate home, for 
work he must, and to John's deep satisfaction it 
was answered by a proposed trip to America and 
a life there. A family about to move to America 
agreed for ten guineas to add him to their circle, 
secure a trade for him, and look after him until 
he was of age. 

America ! O, how it thrilled a young boy's 
heart ! That was in 1829. Our country has 
increased its attractions marvelously since then, 
but it must have been a strong magnet even in 
those days. An Irish girl, green as the isle she 
hailed from, served in my family a while — fort- 
unately for us, she served a little while. She 
declared, before she came to America, that she 
thought she could pick the "goold" off from the 
trees ! Deluded souls ! The only fruit picked 
by some has had a bitter taste, and far better 
for such would it have been if they had stayed 
in the old home amid the fields and friends of 
childhood. However, America, fated to unmake 
young Gough, w T as destined also to make him. 
It was not easy for his parents to say good-bye. 
"When the London night-coach was rolling out 
of the village by the sea John looked back from 



28 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

his perch on the coach roof, and his eyes caught 
glimpse of a wall near which waited and watched 
a woman's lonely figure. It was the tearful 
mother, who had gone ahead to steal one more 
look at her boy. He saw his parents again before 
the ship was out on the Atlantic. Off Sandgate 
the wind died and the ship came to anchor. 
People from the village put off to the ship in boats. 
And who was it that rose in a little craft, the very 
sight of him so cheering a home-sick boy ? 

" That's father ! " was John's glad thought. 
The old soldier was soon aboard, ardently kissing 
his son. Going to America then was a serious 
undertaking, and as the sun dropped down the 
western sky the boats from Sandgate fell off from 
the ship, and then the visitors stood up and sang 
— those on board joining — 

Cl Blest be the dear, uniting love 

Which will not let us part ; 
Our bodies may far hence remove, 

We still are one in heart." 

The song died away, the boats receded, lessened, 
reached the shore again, and the night veiled 
the sea with its shadows. But who was it that 
in the dead of night wanted to see once more the 
emigrant boy? It was his mother, accompanied 



The World Before Him. 29 

by his sister. They had coaxed a boatman — it 
took a half-guinea coax — to bring them to see 
once more the young emigrant, and when they 
left him he went to his berth to spend the rest 
of the night with his tears. When he went on 
deck again and looked about him the Helen was 
far at sea. Overhead the wind roared through 
the rigging. The great white sails, swollen by 
the breeze, were expanded like wings. Up and 
down, up and down, went the ship, breasting 
the long ocean swell, driving through the waters 
and throwing off the foam from her bows, while 
behind her the plowed ocean was white with her 
frothing furrow. Fifty-four days and nights of 
" up and down," only blue sea all around, only 
blue sky every-where above ! 

During that long voyage there was~an abun- 
dance of time for thought, and John Gongh pro- 
foundly thought. He wished — he was at home. 
He must have wished — he had been a different 
boy. He wished — but wishing was useless. 
Sometimes he would look through the scanty 
stock of possessions with which he was beginning 
life, and he would discover little slips on which 
were Bible passages. He well knew whose work 
this was. In his Bible verses also had been 



30 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

marked that he might pack them away in his 
memory. He knew who did the marking. 

The sensitive, heart-sick boy thought of his 
home tenderly. It w T as of no avail. He w T as far 
at sea. Below the foggy horizon was Sandgate, 
away off in England. No going back now, only a 
going on and on, amid tumbling billows and 
under that ceaseless sky, blue and peaceful to- 
day, black with storm to-morrow. The 3d of 
August the Helen reached Sandy Hook. There 
was the New World just before the young pil- 
grim ; and what did this ardent, sensitive, bright, 
fun-loving boy have with which to begin life on 
this side the waters ? Twelve years, a small heap 
of clothing and other stores, at least four books, 
the Bible and Doddridge's Rise and Progress of 
Religion in the Soul, The Economy of Human 
Life, Todd's Lectures to the Young * a fund of 
old memories of the castle and its knights, of a 
soldier-father and his battles, of the adventurous 
Sandgaters and the big sea that defied them ; a 
knack at recitation springing from his faculty of 
imitation and expression ; a keen appreciation of 
the humorous in life ; energy and ambition. Add 
to this a boy's inexperience and infirmities, and 
what may come of this venture in America ? 



A Home on a Farm. 31 



CHAPTER IV. 

A HOME ON A FARM. 

TO a boy who had seen London, New York in 
1829 could not have been a wonderful pict- 
ure. The family that John Gough accompanied 
expected to find a home on a farm in the State 
of New York. The first part of their journey 
was to go up Hudson River, and we will go with 
them. But take the map and trace that noble 
stream. Whenever you meet with a geograph- 
ical name not familiar to you, hunt it up. That 
you may be inclined to search out localities, have 
the atlas handy. Knowledge on a very high 
book-shelf, up where you cannot reach it, is 
likely to stay there. This Hudson River is fa- 
mous for its scenery. It possesses additional in- 
terest from the fact that its discovery was due to 
Hendrick Hudson, who, in the ripe month of 
September, 1609, found this river while hunting 
for China. As he did not know what water- 
course would take him to the land of tea-chests 
he concluded he might as well try the opening 



32 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

we call New York Bay. He followed the river 
for a hundred and fifty miles, and came to the con- 
clusion that no tea-chests could be found in that 
direction. He left this neighborhood when the 
October leaves were turning gold and scarlet as 
if to tempt him to stay longer. It was Hud- 
son who the next year discovered the big, cold 
bay to the far north and now bearing his name, 
and there on its blue waters his mutinous 
crew set him and others adrift in a shallop 
that receded, faded away, and was never seen 
again. Coming back to Hudson River we 
would remember that on this bright stream 
Robert Fulton, in 1807, successfully ran that 
first steam-boat so astonishing the New World. 
When that boat, the Clermont, went to Albany 
it is not strange that spectators who saw this new 
wonder at night described her as " a monster 
moving on the waters, defying the winds and 
tide, and breathing flames and smoke ! " It was 
in a steam-boat that John Gough and his friends 
went up the Hudson. The vessel was doubtless 
superior to the Clermont, but far inferior to the 
steam craft shooting now between Albany and 
New York. John Gough had seen London and 
the Atlantic Ocean, but he was not familiar with 



A Home on a Farm. 33 

such scenery as that turning the banks of the 
Hudson into picture-galleries. He was delighted 
with the views. The river-towns were very dif- 
ferent from what they are now, but the river 
was there and the hills were there. We can im- 
agine this sharp-witted English boy looking with 
admiring eyes at the Palisades rising up to an 
altitude between three hundred and five hundred 
feet. There were the beautiful bays Tappan and 
Haverstraw. There were the heights of West 
Point, where our government established its mil- 
itary academy in 1802. Some young cadet on 
the shore John may have seen from the deck of 
his steam-boat and silently compared him with 
the old veteran in Sandgate who used to put him 
through the broomstick drill. Here in the High- 
lands the young English pilgrim was deeply in- 
terested. We can see him running from bow to 
stern, looking at this headland or that summit. 
At Albany the steam-boat was left and the cars 
taken? No car- wheels turning for his benefit 
in 1829 ; but there is the canal-boat waiting 
to carry the party on toward their home. They 
are towed mile after mile, a big splash now and 
then disturbing the quiet of their journey. The 
noisy water meant their arrival at a lock by which 



34 A Knight that Smote the Dkagon. 

the canal-boat was shifted to a different level of 
water. It was a wonderful land that young 
John, on the Hudson, had passed through, and 
his quick eyes and keen ears did not permit any 
new wonder along the canal to pass without a 
challenge to show its mysteries. The trip ended 
at a farm in Oneida County, the English boy's 
home for two years. Here in his pilgrimage he 
reached a corner in his life. When God's pil- 
grim people had left Egypt they heard at Sinai 
a trumpet-call to duty. 

While young Gough was on this farm he heard 
a call. It sounded for him even as Sinai's trum- 
pet was blown for Israel. It was the voice of 
conscience, and he obeved the summons. When 
that summons may come there is only one course 
to be taken ; a refusal to hear is disobedience to 
God and a harm to our most serious interests. 
John Gough's obedience is no wonder. He had 
been brought up in an atmosphere of prayer at 
home. His mother had a religious nature pecul- 
iarly susceptible. The father w T as a Christian. 
Their prayers came over the water for their 
boy swifter than any white-sailed fleet that ever 
sped across the Atlantic. He was received on 
probation into the Methodist Episcopal Church. 



Alone in New Yoek. 35 



CHAPTER Y. 

ALONE IN NEW YORK. 

FIFTY cents and a little trunk with which to 
conquer a position in New York ! A seeker 
of his fortune stood at the foot of Oortlandt 
Street, his small trunk with him, poor, helpless, 
bewildered, not knowing what to do or where to 
go. He had just come down the Hudson River 
by steam-boat, and he was going — any body up in 
Canada or down in Mexico knew as well as he. 
"What a very lonely place seems a crowded city 
to one who is a stranger, and this stranger now 
was a boy of fourteen, John Bartholomew Gough. 
He had left the farm up in Oneida County. 
He did not feel satisfied with his situation there. 
During his stay of two years he had not gone to 
a school of any kind, during the week or on the 
Lord's day, and such absence from all fountains 
of supply was unsatisfactory to a boy thirsting 
to know more. For various reasons he felt in- 
clined to make a change. He showed this good 
trait, a purpose to consult his father about learn- 



36 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

ing a trade in New York before he left the 
country to hunt up an opportunity. He was poor, 
and postage in those days was more expensive 
than now. To raise the needed money to post 
the letter he sold a knife ! I am wondering how 
long in those days of slow mails he waited before 
his answer came from England. His letter 
home reached Sandgate at last, and then an 
answer crawled back to Oneida County. His 
father told him to do as he thought best, and lie 
now was at the foot of Cortlandt Street, ]STew 
York before him, a diminutive trunk with him, 
and fifty cents in his pocket. 

As he stood there staring about him, a man will- 
ing to earn a penny stepped up and asked where 
he would like to have his trunk taken. Where? 
Yes, where in the big city ? New York was not 
as large as nowadays, but it contained about 
two hundred thousand people, a crowd big 
enough to swallow up this poor little pilgrim 
from the country and so effectually dispose of 
him that he would never be heard from again. 
But "where?" A cold wave of desolateness 
and loneliness swept over him. It chilled him 
to his very heart. But John Gough had not 
come alone to the city. He was like that patri- 



Alone ix New York. 37 

arch of olden time who left home, kindred, 
country, but went out feeling that God was with 
him. Going into the world is ever serious. Ever 
take God with you. That blessed Bible verse 
came to him, " Trust in the Lord, and do good ; 
so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou 
shalt be fed." He was not so helpless after all. 
That old English grit that had traveled with him 
over the Atlantic came to his aid. Above all, 
the God of his English boyhood, the God to 
whom he had given himself amid the forests of 
America, strengthened him, and up to his shoul- 
der went his trunk, and off moved Gongh ready 
to go or do whatever Providence might suggest. 
"What would you do alone in a big city, 
entering it as a stranger, wanting to go some- 
where and wanting to do something, but utterly 
at a loss as to place or pursuit ? Put yourself in 
the place of that boy of fourteen. Get under 
his trunk. Make his situation your own. What 
would you have done ? A boy not ashamed to 
carry his own trunk is not the most helpless 
being in the world, and if he will use his tongue 
and ask, and use his feet and go, he will find 
something to do and for it receive something 
to eat. Tongue and feet, readiness to ask, and 



38 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

willingness to go — these are two essentials of suc- 
cess. If a man come to me to sell something, 
come as an agent for a book or some kind of 
wares and I cannot trade with him, I am always 
sorry not to give him my custom. We naturally 
want to help one another. If he be bashful, 
slow of tongue, not used to the business, and 
without the energy which would naturally make 
one qualification for the business, then I also pity 
him. If he can talk, if he quit me only to hunt 
up at once another customer, I say, u That man 
does not need my pity. He will not be without 
success." If yon can talk, and if you will drive 
round, never worry. You are sure to have some 
measure of success. 

Gough's first inquiry naturally was where he 
could shelter his head. He went to a hotel 
called the " Brown Jug." That was rather om- 
inous when we remember the use to which some 
brown jugs have been put. Gough did not hes- 
itate to use his tongue, and, asking for work, 
found an opportunity in the book-bindery of the 
Methodist Book Concern. His pay per week 
was two dollars and twenty-five cents. That 
sounds small, but he found board for two dollars. 
This enabled him to live inside of his income, 



Alone in New York. 39 

provided his clothes did not give out. It proved 
to be a miserable refuge where he boarded. His 
bed-fellow was an Irishman very ill with fever 
and ague, and the bedroom was under the rafters 
among the spiders. The second night Gough 
had a bed — such as it was — to himself, but his 
room-mate died in great agony of mind that very 
night. Gough felt that his situation in New 
York was any thing but agreeable. After the 
above experience he was at his work trying to 
labor patiently, but he wet with his big, hot 
tears the paper he was handling. A young 
woman saw him crying. She asked him the rea- 
son of it, and he was moved to tell her about his 
life. " Poor distressed child ! " she said ; " you 
shall go home with me to-night." When the 
two reached her home, the young woman took 
her mother aside, who soon came back and said, 
" Poor boy ! I will be a mother to you." The 
lady was Mrs. Egbert, and she kept her word. 

Poor boys away from home may thank God 
heartily if they find in any one that sympathy 
and counsel which made the old home bright and 
strengthening. We may remember that Martin 
Luther, when a needy student, used to sing in the 
streets of Eisenach, hoping to receive for his 



40 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

music a piece of bread. One night, having been 
turned away from three homes, he was making 
up his mind to go to his quarters hungry and 
faint. He stopped to think about it before a 
house in St. George's Square, and lie asked him- 
self if lie must give up his studies, because so 
poor and hungry. Must he go back to his 
father's home to work in the dark mines there 
in the neighborhood ? While halting and debat- 
ing, the door of the house before him swung 
back, and Madame Ursula Cotta stood there. 
She had previously noticed him at church serv- 
ices, and she now called him into the house, gave 
him food, and became his friend. It is such a 
kind word that smooths many a rugged way, 
and, perhaps, influences the course of a life-time. 
Madame Cotta did not once think she was help- 
ing the glorious cause of the Reformation in 
Germany meet and turn a hungry corner. 
Young Gough found friends in New York, for 
he put himself where he would be likely to find 
friends. A church in Allen Street received him 
to its fellowship. It is always an excellent plan, 
especially if away from home, to place one's self 
amid church associations. It now seemed as if 
a bright future were opening before young 



Alone in New York. 41 

Gougli — but ! How ominous is that word ! How 
often we read of a life that runs off in unin- 
terrupted prosperity, when abruptly that word 
"but 53 is seen in the narrative! It is like the 
train of cars gliding smoothly over a bridge until 
it comes to the open draw, and then suddenly 
there is a plunge downward. That " but " is the 
open draw. 

I find no detailed explanation of the fact that 
young Gough forsook his church and his place 
of employment. He felt the influence of "cir- 
cumstances," as he writes in that far-away, hum- 
ble story of his life. Then he tells about temp- 
tation. He confesses carelessness in spiritual 
things. He had reached a" but" in his life. It 
did not probably seem so at the time, but in 
reality it was a serious change in his prospects. 
That old Book Concern on Crosby Street ! Hum- 
ble indeed its walls compared with those of the 
present palatial structure housing so many of the 
publication interests of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church to-day ; but from the humble quarters 
on Crosby Street how far-reaching in many lives 
have been the streams of influence shooting off 
into the future ! Many have been the private 
histories affected by the old house on Mulberry 



42 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Street. Gough's course might Lave been thus 
helpfully affected by his connection with that 
source of power. He neglected his opportunity. 
You can stand just here and see that John 
Gough is striking off into a course of shame and 
sorrow. He had come from the forests and the 
fields, from the pure atmosphere of the hills, 
from the clear crystal of the streams, into a 
Babylon, amid the distracting, confusing, tempt- 
ing influences of the city, and it was soon to be 
seen that Babylon was too powerful for this im- 
pressible boy, sympathetic, social, quick to see, 
quick to hear, ready for laugh when others made 
the fun, and ready enough to make the fun for 
other people's laughter. He became careless in 
his religious duties. He drifted off into a 
life heedless of its obligations to God. Ah ! 
when we virtually invite God to go out of our 
souls, who can tell what influences unbidden 
may come thronging in ? 




Mother in America. 43 



CHAPTER VI. 

MOTHER IN AMERICA. 

HOW great is the drawing of the heart toward 
the mother in a home ! I can understand 
the feelings of the little girl who ventured to 
accept the invitation given her by an acquaint- 
ance to come into a strange cottage. The oc- 
cupants were at dinner. Not a familiar face did 
she see within. She shrank from entering. 
When pressed to come forward she asked her 
friend in a child's simple way, "Is — there any 
— mother in there ? " 

" Yes, my dear, there is a mother here." 
" O," she said, readily, " then I'll go in ; for 
I'm not afraid if there's a mother there." 

Is it any wonder that a homeless boy in 
America thought of the old home in England, 
that his love went fast and often across the 
waters, and that he wished mother could be with 
him? Couldn't father come too? And sister, 
if she were only with him ! John's business 
was improving, and it seemed to him as if his 



44 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

prospects would warrant the establishment of 
the home-circle in America. If he could only 
get its links over the sea, that circle would at 
once and hopefully be formed. So he sent for 
the links. One Saturday afternoon in August, 
when he was sixteen, a short message came to 
him that threw him into great excitement. It 
was his own mother's handwriting saying that 
she and her daughter were on board a packet, 
and she wanted John to come to them as soon 
as the ship was docked ! Yes, there was his 
mother's handwriting ! There was her name ! 
That very moment the ship might be at her 
moorings! New York had at least one happy 
boy that Saturday afternoon. Down went the 
work, and off w r ent the worker. Mother come 
from England ! How the thought set his heart 
to beating ! As he was tripping away, his shoe 
needed mending, and he turned into a store 
where he had told his mother and sister to call 
when they came. There he learned that his 
mother had already called. After he left, who 
was it he saw hurrying along, apparently hunt- 
ing up some address, glancing at a bit of paper 
in the hand and then at the houses? It was a 
little woman. 



Mother in America. 45 

" Mother ! " thought John. 

Would she know this important American cit- 
izen now aged sixteen ? He passed her, and then 
came back and repassed her. Greatness was 
not recognized. John could not wait any longer. 
He stepped up ; he called, " Mother ! " She 
turned, and what a hug she gave her boy ! In 
the sight, too, of all New York — at least that 
fraction of it just then in that neighborhood. 
"When he reached the barge w^here her lug- 
gage was he had another hug, and this time 
from his sister Mary, who sprang for him. 
John's father had not come. His pension from 
government detained the old soldier in En- 
gland, and he hoped by waiting that he might 
turn it into cash in hand. 

Mother, John, and Mary! Three of the fam- 
ily links in America. I can see them going up 
the street, talking and laughing, John loaded 
with an unusual sense of importance now that 
he is the male protector of this company, its 
proud escort amid the attractions of America's 
greatest city. John was then earning three dol- 
lars a week. His mother had brought a few 
household goods from England, and housekeep- 
ing was started at once. Cups and saucers for 



46 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

three at their first tea, and not a rich feast on 
the other pieces of crockery ; but it was a happy 
gathering, and no voice that I hear is more en- 
thusiastic than John's. To be sure, they had 
only two rooms, but two homely rooms, if con- 
tented hearts are there, will hold more happiness 
than all the gilded palaces of ugly strife in the 
world. The autumn was one of comfort until 
bleak November winds began to blow, and then 
the winds swept straight and hard into the 
Gough quarters. 

"Hard Times" lost John his situation. Sis- 
ter Mollie parted with hers for the same reason. 
There they w^ere, out of employment. What 
could be done ? I can see them staring at one 
another in anxious inquiry. There were the two 
rooms they lived in, for which they paid a dollar 
and a quarter a week. They could and did give 
up one, and then they multiplied this room into 
two when night came, and the multiplier 
was a curtain strung across the apartment. So 
at night they had as many rooms as before, 
and their weekly rent was only fifty cents. If 
sticks of wood and baskets of coal and bags of 
flour could be multiplied as easily, and as the 
figures go up in quantity they also go down in 



Mother in America. 47 

price, how cheap would living be for poor peo- 
ple ! Now and then John had a chance to work, 
but any such spasms of employment could not 
prevent poverty's pinch. The winter was cold. 
The winter was hungry. Where could the mut- 
ton be found for the broth that Mrs. Gough, 
then in feeble health, one day longed for? 
John looked about his hungry home and thought 
of his best coat. It would not make broth, but 
he could pawn it for food. It went to the pawn- 
broker's, and back to the home came food for 
the family. New York then was nearer to the 
country than it now is. Sometimes John 
would push off a mile or two and lug home any 
pieces of wood he could pick up in the road. 
That hungry winter, once when he saw his 
mother crying he questioned her. He learned 
that the home was foodless. No bread, but 
sharp, biting hunger. He could not stand his 
mother's tears. Out-doors he went, and down 
the street he strayed, hungry, perplexed, crying. 
What was the matter, a stranger asked. 

" I'm hungry, and so is my mother," John 
told him. 

"Well, I can't do much; but I'll get you a 
loaf," replied the stranger. 



48 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

He bought and gave John a three-cent loaf. 
Only a three-cent loaf ; but how welcome it was ! 
John went home with a much lightened heart. 

" See, mother ! " we seem to hear him saying as 
he springs into the one room that is the home 
of poverty, and yet home. It is not a barrel of 
flour that has come, but just a loaf, a three-cent 
loaf. 

And the mother, she is so affected that she 
takes up that treasure-casket, the Bible. She 
lays it on the feeble old table of pine. She opens 
it. She reads from it, and then they all fall 
upon their knees, and she pours out her soul to 
God and beseeches the God of the poor to bless 
that humble loaf. Sweeter than all the bread 
of sin that John Gougli afterward ate was that 
poor little lump of food up in the city attic, 
costing only three cents. I wonder if we realize 
how many people are glad to get just a three- 
cent loaf. 



Mother Gone. 43 



CHAPTER VII. 

MOTHER GONE. 

SPRING is apt to rout Hard Times. It brought 
relief to John and Mary Gough. They 
found work again. The coat that had traveled 
to the pawn-broker's journeyed back again to 
its nail in the garret. The summer, though, was 
a worse foe to John than the winter. His 
mother complained of weakness. Up in that 
garret with its one little window she felt oppress- 
ively the heat that poured down upon the roof. 
One July day John wished to go off and take 
a bath. The weather was sultry, and his mother 
had been speaking of weakness, but it did not 
alarm John. He went away, first asking the favor 
of a lunch of rice and milk when he returned. 
Somehow that day John Gough was in special 
glee. With Ids friends on this bathing-trip he 
sang songs and joined in their careless laughter. 
He did not anticipate any serious trouble. He 
went home from that trip whistling jjway, care- 
less as a bird at its morning song, and was passing 
4 



50 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

up the steps, when on the threshold of the door 
of his home Mary met him. She grasped him and 
said just these words : " John, mother's dead ! " 
What? It could not be! Mother dead? 
If the sister had been an assassin and had dealt 
him a heavy blow he could not have been more 
overwhelmed with surprise. In a daze he halted. 
He lingered, still bewildered. When he was 
allowed to go up to his attic home there in the 
awful hush of that secluded spot lay his dear, 
dead mother ! She had been found dead by a 
young man who, passing the open door, saw her 
prostrate on the floor, smitten down with apo- 
plexy. There, among the relics of a fire in the 
grate, subsequently was found the saucepan in 
which she faithfully had placed John's rice 
and milk, only a charred mass now on the bot- 
tom of the pan. What a pathetic relic ! All 
through the night he watched by that silent form 
of his beloved mother. It was a night-watch of 
pain, in long, long solitude. When the morn- 
ing light broke gently in the east, and stole 
through the one little window into that room 
where the dead slept in peace and the watcher 
waited in agony, John laid by her side the hand 
he had taken in his, a hand that had toiled so 



Mother Gone. 51 

un weary ingly for him, but powerless now for- 
ever. Then he stole out into the city. It was a 
world of unreality, and he was an unreal being in 
it. He went to a wharf and there sat vacantly, 
sorrowfully staring at the water. Mother dead ! 
Bewildered, burdened, he returned to what was 
no longer a home. The coroner had been there 
and left word about the burial and when it would 
be. Burial ? Where ? How ? Who had money 
to pay for the interment? Again John went 
out in his bewilderment and helplessness. Again 
he was a confused wanderer. When he re- 
turned his sister told him about the people who 
had been there. Laying his mother's body in a 
box of pine they had carried it off in a cart to 
the place of burial. John told his sister they 
would follow the hearse. They must see the 
burial. It was a humble train stealing to the 
pauper's burial. In the street went the hearse 
and its sad, silent load. Those who followed to 
mourn were just that son and daughter, only 
two to lament her, two that sobbed and went all 
alone. At the burial-place one other coffin was 
seen in the cart, and that was a tiny pauper, a little 
child. There w r as no prayer over the mother's 
coffin that was placed in a trench, earth commit- 



O- 



A KXIGHT THAT SMOTE THE DRAGON. 



ted to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The 
two mourners watched the burial, and then in 
sorrow moved away from the pauper's grave. 

" Now, Mary, what shall we do ? " was the 
question that John asked his sister when they 
came back to their poor, desolated home. 

What next ? 

Death may come into our homes, but we can- 
not long seclude ourselves in the privacy of our 
sorrow. Life presses hard upon death, and forces 
its imperative duties upon our notice. 

What next ? 

It was a very serious question. 

The night of that day John could not endure 
a stay in the home now so unreal, and lie went 
out into the darkness to wander about the streets. 
Food was repulsive to him, and sleep seemed to 
flee from him. That was recorded of the first 
night. 

What next ? What in after days ? 

The old home was broken up. Sickness fol- 
lowed John Gondii's vigils and his abstinence 
from food. When he w r as recovering from it 
he went among his old acquaintances, the Eg- 
berts, who cared for him in his convalescence, 
and then he visited his friends on the farm up 



Mother Gone. 53 

in the country. His sister found work in New 
York, and boarded in that quarter of the city 
where she was employed. John Gough was 
approaching a very serious epoch in his life. 
He had gone down into the depths of a terrible 
sorrow. His mother had thrown about him the 
restraining influences of prayer and the Bible. 
She was now dead. It was like lifting the smile 
of heaven off from the earth, taking away the 
sunshine, the light, the beauty and ^fragrance of 
blossoms, the music of birds. "With such an at- 
mosphere of summer that praying mother had 
surrounded her boy. What would he do with- 
out her ? When he came back to New York he 
who had gone into this dark, terrible sorrow, 
must meet the world and all its distracting influ- 
ences. How would he meet them ? 

Some day you go down into a gloomy mine. 
You descend by a pathway hollowed out in the 
sides of the abyss. At one side of that pathway 
runs a rope all the way down. As you descend, 
you count little niches, each holding a light, and 
what if these illuminate little placards saying, 
" Hold on to the rope ! " Would you neglect 
those injunctions ? You come to a place shrouded 
in darkness. You hear far, far below you the 



54 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

sound of a falling rock, the blow echoing up to 
you through those dreary spaces. How deep is 
that abyss ! Would you not grasp that rope 
tightly ? You reach another lighted injunction 
calling out to you, " Hold on to the rope ! " Here 
the path has become very narrow. A careless 
step might send you abruptly down, down, 
into those awful depths. How you would 
cling just there ! John Gough was going down 
into an abyss worse than the depths of his dark 
sorrow for his mother. He was to meet again 
the temptations, the perilous seductions of a 
great city. O, if he had only clung to prayer, 
that rope let down from heaven and holding us 
back from every precipice we may meet ! O, if 
he had only clung to those other ropes of safety, 
the Bible, the society of Christian men- and 
women, the Church of God ! Let us hold on to 
every rope, and though temptations be not 
far away, they will not bewilder and attract us 
from the path. Between us and them is that rope 
of safety which God's hand itself has stretched 
for our guidance and support. Some young 
men never feel the temptations of city life, for 
they are careful to hold on to God's appointed 
helps for our souls. Let us cling to the rope ! 



Going Down. 55 



CHAPTER VIII. 

GOING DOWN. 

IN the autumn after his mother's death John 
Gough, then seventeen years old, again went 
to work in New York. And he went among — 
tempters. What kind of tempters ? Old to- 
pers from the dram-shops, with their red noses 
and pimpled faces, men who reeled at him out 
of the gutters, bringing their rags and filth, 
men raving in the midst of delirium tremens, 
men with palsied hands and trembling feet, about 
to sink into the grave ? These are not the 
tempters that have influence over a young fel- 
low like John Gough. He went among a circle 
of young men known as "respectable," but still 
convivialists, who liked " a glass " — several of 
them — on a table, and then surrounded it with 
their chat and laughter, their jests and songs. 
Into such a circle John Gough ventured, a cir- 
cle more dangerous than the depths of any dark 
mine, and there he tarried. If he had been a 
young Spartan he would have faced a different 



56 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

display of the drink-habit. The Spartans are 
reported to have forced slaves to drink to a 
state of beastly intoxication that the youth of 
Sparta might see how disgraceful was drunken- 
ness, how serious might be its evils. John 
Gongh saw those beginning the downward walk 
of sin and shame, and was affected differently. 
This was in 1834. We shall appreciate Gougli's 
peril more fully if we consider that there was 
not a strong public sentiment to help him to 
abstain from drink, and how much there was, on 
the other hand, to encourage him to make a fool 
and a failure of himself! Once the use of in- 
toxicating beverages was exceedingly common. 
There were certain Scotch-Irish settlers who 
arrived in one of our States in 1710. They 
were verv devoted to their denominational stand- 
ard of belief, and devoted to something else also. 
It was said of them that they " never gave up 
a pint of doctrine or a pint of rum." 

Was it a funeral? This is an account of a 
minister's funeral in those far-off days, when 
almost every body drank liquor : 

" Every man who attended the funeral was 
met at the door, and a glass of rum, poured from 
a flask, was there offered him. Every woman 



Going Down. 57 

was met in the same manner, and a glass was 
poured for her. As it was a minister's funeral 
at least a hundred and fifty must have gathered, 
and a hundred and fifty glasses must have been 
offered. Not every glass was emptied, and some, 
probably, were not touched, though we w x ould 
not have trusted the temperance principles of the 
greater part of the mourners. We do not know 
how large the glasses were, but it would seem 
as if sixty pints of rum would be needed to start 
such a funeral. When the service was over, 
when the coffin had been carried to the grave, 
when the procession had come back to the house, 
then two rooms were set apart for a friendly 
glass. The bearers took one room and the peo- 
ple in general sat down in the other. In each 
room was a table, and this was decorated with 
bottles of rum, with tobacco and pipes. There 
the men tipped the bottles and smoked the 
pipes. How many pints, quarts, gallons of rum 
it took to close up the occasion ' decently and 
in order' I cannot say. It was said that one 
or two were drunk out-doors, and celebrated 
by singing funeral songs ! " Well for society 
was it that only occasional were these minister- 
funerals ! 



58 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Was there a religious gathering ? Dr. Lyman 
Beecher, the father of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, 
gave this account : " At the ordination at Ply- 
mouth the preparation for our creature-comforts, 
in the sitting-room of Mr. Heart's house, besides 
food, was a broad sideboard covered with decan- 
ters and bottles and sugar and pitchers of water. 
There we found all the various kinds of liquors 
then in vogue. The drinking was apparently 
universal. This preparation was made by the 
society as a matter of course. When the conso- 
ciation arrived they always took something to 
drink round ; also before public services, and 
always on their return. As they could not all 
drink at once they were obliged to stand and 
wait, as people do when they go to mill. There 
was a decanter of spirits also on the dinner-table 
to help digestion, and gentlemen partook of it 
through the afternoon and evening as they felt 
the need, some more, some less ; and the side- 
board, with the spilling of water and sugar and 
liquor, looked and smelled like the bar of a very 
active grog-shop. None of the consociation 
were drunk, but that there was not, at times, a 
considerable amount of exhilaration I cannot af- 
firm." 



Going Down. 59 

If at occasions professedly religious drinking 
was so common, how must it have been when 
men met just to work, to celebrate a marriage, 
or get mad over politics ? At an election dinner 
over which the General Court of Massachusetts, 
in 1769, made merry, I find that this quantity of 
drink was necessary to stimulate those grave leg- 
islators to gleefulness and to wash down two 
hundred and four dinners, namely, seventy-two 
bottles of Madeira, twenty-eight of Lisbon, ten 
of claret, seventeen of port, eighteen of porter, 
fifty " double bowls" of punch, each containing 
two quarts, and also cider ! The amount of the 
latter is not given, and it was probably stronger 
than sweet cider. 

God did not purpose that the conscience of the 
Church should stay drowsy on this subject. In 
the last century there was some awakening of 
interest in the subject of abstinence. Still, there 
was a general apathy. In the present century 
there has been a very positive stirring of the 
consciences of men. 

In 1825 Dr. Lyman Beecher, who was a fa- 
mous pulpit thunderer, fired off six batteries 
against intemperance, and the six batteries were 
six sermons. Their echoes rumbled through and 



60 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

startled New England. The ministers drove 
liquor from tables at ordinations and in their 
homes. In Boston, 1826, the American Tem- 
perance Society was formed " to restrain and pre- 
vent the intemperate use of intoxicating liquors." 
In 1829 the New York State Temperance So- 
ciety was started. It soon had a thousand local 
societies and a hundred thousand members. 
Then there was a wonderful movement called 
the " Washingtonian." Its origin shows out of 
what strange seed God's harvests may grow. 
At a Baltimore tavern a drinking-club used to 
meet. A temperance lecture was to be given in 
one of the churches. What a good idea it would 
be to appoint a committee to visit the church 
and hear the lecture, and then to report to the 
club ! It is thought the motive in all this may 
have been simply fun. However, the commit- 
tee did their duty, heard the lecture, and brought 
back a report. Then broke out a discussion. It 
raged like flames in a hay-stack. When the land- 
lord stepped in it was like another armful of hay 
on the fire. Cold water may be good for fire, and 
the flames spread when six pledged themselves 
to total abstinence, starting a society. The name 
chosen was the Washingtonian Total Abstinence 



Going Down. 61 

Society, and the year was 1840, the month April. 
From that center of activity went out a mighty 
influence. One John H. W. Hawkins, a poor 
drunkard, joined the society and became a cold- 
water champion. This movement is still felt. 

It should be noticed right here that all this 
was in John B. Gough's young manhood, and 
not so early as the date when he joined his gen- 
tlemanly tempters in New York. The Wash- 
ington ian reform was half a dozen years away 
when John B. Gough ventured into the above 
circle of associates. Circle ? It was a whirl- 
pool of death, a maelstrom ! Those friends were 
glad to see him. Bright, social, a fun-lover, a 
good singer, his memory packed with entertain- 
ing stories, and having such powers of imitation 
that he could easily act out each character in the 
stories, the young convivialists had a welcome 
for him. Where the foolish and wrong elements 
are so continuously cultivated the good must 
wither through neglect. His mother's wisdom 
was not repeated in the son's life. In his bram- 
ble-garden he had no place for such healthy 
growth as the precepts of that mother. Gough's 
talent for mimicry and gift at story-telling con- 
tinued to make him popular, and, as an amateur, 



62 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

he tried his luck on the stage. His employer 
moving his business to Bristol, R. L, Gougli 
followed him. He was in his twentieth year 
w T hen his employer failed, and Gough went 
to Providence. He took his drinking habits 
with him v even as a prisoner carries round the 
chain and ball attached to his feet. He found 
w T ork, and found also a chance to go on the stage. 
Finally he and his employer separated, and the 
mechanic became stage-actor solely. It seemed 
as if he were gaining notoriety by his perform- 
ances when all these glowing promises of suc- 
cess came to a sudden end, like a rocket's fire. 
The theater shut up. Gough was not paid. The 
streets of Providence had another case of want. 
He had, in one sense, less money, and yet drank 
more liquor — a feat to which only a drunkard is 
equal. One night he was so near pauperage 
that he kept moving about the streets almost 
until morning just to keep some measure of 
comfort in his body. To one of the city's low- 
est inns he w T ent in his despair, and there found 
a shabby shelter. Work he had tried to get, but 
could not secure it. At last he was introduced 
to a man hunting up actors for a theater in Bos- 
ton, and Gough was taken to that city and be- 



Going Down. 63 

came an actor there. The theater collapsed, and 
Gough's pay collapsed with it. He was adrift 
again, shabby, in want, with an appetite slowly 
consuming him. He went to work again, but 
January, 1838, he was out of work again. And 
what was the reason assigned for the discharge 
of this young man, not yet twenty-one ? Too 
shabby for his employer's place of work, and — 
he drank ! 

Did not Gough understand his peril ? He 
speaks in after years of his susceptibility to the 
poison in intoxicating drinks. He ought to have 
appreciated it at this stage of his life. 

Why did he not let drink alone? Ask the 
slave why he does not break his hard, heavy 
chains ? " Can't," he says, pitifully. " Can ! " 
however, says the drink-slave. Yes, in theory. 
He has the power, but he will not use it, and the 
effect is the same when you will not as when 
you cannot. The drinker continues to yield to 
the seductions of drink. All the time it winds its 
chains closer and closer about him, chains that 
are heavier and heavier. At last, when he thinks 
of throwing them off, he feels that he is chafed 
and held by fetters whose strength is a surprise 
to him. But where all this time was John 



64 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Gouglrs past ? Where was the influence of home, 
of the mother that had followed ~him across the 
wide-rolling water, and in the spirit of a true 
consecration staying with him until her death ? 

Had he forgotten all this? Did he think of 
her at all ? A cherished memory would have 
been a strong restraint. Sir Francis Phillips 
was accustomed to assert, " I should have been 
an infidel were it not for the recollection when 
my departed mother used to take my little hand 
in hers and make me say my prayers on my 
bended knees." "Was there no thought of the 
past to hold Gough back from sin? If his 
mother had lived and he could have seen her 
daily looking at him, face to face, watching him, 
I cannot think he would have strayed so far. 
Visible presence is sometimes very powerful in 
its influence. General Swift, of Boston, once 
spoke of a habit that his mother had. She 
would say to him, " I want to live long enough 
to see you come to your Lord and to your Sav- 
iour." Once after she had heard him in the 
delivery of an eloquent address during the civil 
war she remarked, "If I could see you stand 
there and talk for your Saviour I would ask 
nothing more." One day when he was serving 



Going Down. 65 

the State of Massachusetts in its Legislature there 
was a bill on the liquor question before the 
house. If not actually prohibitory it was one 
restrictive in its application. Those who sent 
General Swift to the Legislature were not in 
favor of the bill, and they looked to him to 
vote accordingly. He intended that his vote 
should express their wishes. When the day 
for action came, somebody besides his constitu- 
ency was looking at him, and that was his 
mother, up in the spectators' gallery. She was 
there hoping the bill would succeed, desirous 
that her son should help give it success. There 
she was, watching him. He expected to vote 
with the noes, but when about to say no he 
chanced to look up to the gallery, and there was 
his dear old mother, looking down ! She saw him 
even as he saw her. To the astonishment of all, 
including the voter himself, his voice rang out 
clear and decided, "Aye!'' Those who have 
heard him know what a robust, penetrating 
voice he has. His mother's influence had car- 
ried the day, and she was not astonished at the 
result. u My son," she said, " I had prayed the 
Lord not to let you vote wrong, and I knew you 
could not." 



66 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

A mother's visible influence ! If Gough's 
mother could have lived on earth even as she 
lived in heaven, and could have brought her 
influence to bear upon him before the drink- 
chains once so soft and plastic had hardened and 
grown rigid, his life might have been very dif- 
ferent. As it was, what outlook of encourage- 
ment was there for him ? 




Down Deeper. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

DOWN DEEPER. 

NEWBURYPORT, Mass., is a charming old 
sea-port town. Past it murmurs the bright 
Merrimac, with its hushed songs of the blue hills, 
crystal lakes, and green forests, which it has seen 
and out of whose heart it has rippled and so 
come singing down to the sea. The place is one 
of varied business interests. The country people 
come here to trade, manufacturers here drive 
their busy wheels, and at its wharves the vessels 
lift their wings and out of the river silently glide. 
One winter evening, years ago, there came 
from Boston to this interesting old town a young 
man. He was not yet twenty-one. He was a 
person of versatile talents. He could put a neat 
coat on the back of a volume. He could tell and 
act out effectively a good story. He could sing. 
He had a power over others when he wished to 
exert it in appeal that he himself little appreci- 
ated. Others felt it but did not adequately rate 
it. Social, liking his kind, he might have become 



68 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

the center of an ever- widening circle of influence 
for good. A new man even in an old town has a 
peculiar opportunity, and this young book-binder 
had it in this ancient town bv the sea. What a 
power he might have here become ! He had 
made his mistakes in the past, but he was not 
obliged to repeat them. What would John 
Gough, the book-binder, do with his new oppor- 
tunity ? He had come from Boston to improve 
a business chance that had been reported to him. 
He was to try the world again, on six dollars a 
week. Had he brought his old enemies with 
him? Would he leave the bottle behind ? He 
did quit that, and he began life as an abstainer. 
While he left the bottle behind, he had brought 
with him the old social instinct, and he could 
not very well come without it. Unfortunately, 
he decided to gratify it in the w T rong direction. 
If that social instinct had carried him where the 
best influences were — and Newburyport bad an 
abundance of them — if he had gratified it in 
church circles, it would have been a safe treatment. 
For a few weeks he went without touching liquor. 
It took a hard fight to do this, but while fighting 
the enemy on the side of his appetite he surren- 
dered on the side of his sympathetic, social nature. 



Down Deeper. 69 

He soon joined a fire-engine company. This 
kind of organization lias always been effective in 
meeting fire and in fighting it with water, but 
before that combination, " fire-water," engine 
companies in the past have not always been vic- 
torious. Customs, though, have happily changed: 

At Newbnryport the bottle finally became 
Gough's companion, and the impression he made 
on Newburyport was far from favorable. In the 
summer, as work was scanty, the book-binder 
became fisherman. He went off on a cruise to 
the Bay of Chaleurs. The fisherman's life was 
rough, but as liquor could not easily be obtained 
the trip had its compensations. When on shore 
Gough made up for deficiencies, as he considered 
them, and drank deeply. Sometimes in visiting 
a vessel he could obtain the beverage. 

A tippler is sure to do something foolish, if not 
fatal, when he ventures on the water. I once 
heard of two men who had been on a small trip by 
boat to a town, and at night started to go home. 
They knew enough to find their boat at a 
wharf, and knew enough to get into it, and 
knew altogether too much for their own good 
when they put a jug into the boat. They 
took up their oars and began to row. I can 



70 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

imagine that they varied their pall on the oars 
with a pull at the jug. But somehow they did 
not make so much progress in pulling on their 
oars as they undoubtedly did when trying to empty 
their jug. Bewildered, confused, wondering what 
obstacle hindered them, they found they had for- 
gotten — to untie the boat ! Gough's adventure 
was not only a drunkard's error but almost a 
fatal one. He with others had visited a craft in 
the vicinity of his vessel, and he came back so 
intoxicated that he went where drunkards are 
apt to go, down to the 'bottom of the boat. In 
that position others failed to think of him, and 
they prepared, when boarding their craft, to 
take up the boat in the usual fashion. This 
method was to slip a hook into the bow and then 
pull the boat up. The hook was inserted and 
the boat w T as coming up, bow first, but Gough 
was going down, tumbling violently into the 
stern. It was a wonder that the drunkard wdio 
had gone to the bottom of the boat did not go 
to the bottom of the sea. Aroused by the fall, 
he shouted, and was saved from a near death. 

Did I call Gough a drunkard ? He did 
not think he was such. The word " drunkard " 
suggests a situation where hope has almost 



Down Deeper. 71 

departed; and what tippler likes to say that? 
Dr. Johnson has remarked that u the diminutive 
chains of habit are seldom heavy enough to be 
felt till they are too strong to be broken." 
Gough had not come to any such conclusion. It 
is not surprising that he was unconscious of his 
real peril. It is Archbishop Whately who has 
asserted very truthfully, " Habits are formed, 
not at one stroke, but gradually arjd insensibly, 
so that unless vigilant care be employed a great 
change may come over the character without 
being conscious of any." 

Habit is making and unmaking us all the time. 
Look out for habits. Gough did, but he looked 
out for the wrong ones. Steadily he cherished 
the habit of drink. He was absent three and a 
half months on that fishing trip. The crew had 
one very serious experience, that of an awful 
storm which sent old seamen to their prayers 
and almost sent the vessel ashore. Gough was 
now twenty-one. That year he w T as married, 
and as he had saved money while absent on his 
fishing trip he was able to buy furniture and 
^egin home-life once more. It seemed as if the 
new home and his marriage vows would have 
aroused within him an ambition and a purpose 



72 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

stronger than any love for drink. Doubtless 
Gough's lips trembled with the excitement of 
vows made to consecrate that home to the pur- 
est, holiest influences. It is the home-life that 
should go down to the strongest motives and lay 
hold of them, even as a man in building strives to 
touch a strong, rock foundation. I knew a man 
who had been behind the walls of a penal insti- 
tution. He had also been behind the walls of a 
habit that may be a still stronger prison-hold, and 
rum was the jailer. He had been released from 
the former. The grace of God had come into his 
heart, and in that strength he went out also to fight 
a battle with appetite. He was successful. He 
was blessed in a business effort. He had been 
married, and his wife soon expected to come to 
the town where he was and join him. He 
wanted a home. A man of strong, sympathetic 
feelings, belonged for companionship and longed 
for a place that could be called by that endeared 
name, "home." 

" I cannot live without some one to tell my 
troubles to," he declared. " May I never suffer 
what I now endure alone again ! " 

He could not afford an expensive home, but 
lie must have something. He hired two rooms, 



Dowx Deeper. 73 

over which was a small attic. The furnishings 
were very simple, but to him all this preparation 
was of greater interest than a king's equipment 
of a palace. The ex-convict was now a new 
man, and like other men lie expected to have a 
home. His soul was thrilled with this expecta- 
tion. 

a And now," he said to himself, "I must 
dedicate my home." 

Why not ? Other institutions are dedicated, 
and why not the ex-convict's home ? But how ? 
His old chaplain happened to call upon him, 
and he said the chaplain must go and see 
J lis home and that it must be dedicated. So in 
the simply furnished room that was both bed- 
room and parlor, about nine by twelve, the two 
sat down on two plain wooden chairs. A fold 
of red cloth between the cheap curtain and the 
panes had been drawn across the upper part of 
one of the windows, and the warm, cheerful 
tone given to the colors in the room as the sun- 
shine fell on this inexpensive red lambrequin 
augured well for the approaching dedication. 

Knowing the man so well, I can imagine just 
how he looked as the services went on. They 
were opened with the singing of the hymn, " I 



74 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

need Thee every hour." Poor fellow ! He had 
known what that meant, and now that he was 
going to have a home the voicing of his need of 
God's blessing was fervent as ever. The serv- 
ices went on, a warm, hopeful flush of color 
brightening the humble room. When the hymn 
was concluded, then he opened the old Bible 
bought with his earnings as a convict and read 
from it the seventh chapter of St. Matthew, 
" Judge not, that ye be not judged." In it is 
that assurance, "Ask, and it shall be given you." 
In the closing portion is that vivid sketch of 
shattering rain and sweeping floods out of 
which rises the house founded upon a rock. 
The man's soul was tremulous with emotion. 

" O, my God," he exclaimed, "how I have 
prayed for a home ! And O how I have worked 
for it ! And now here I am. Thank God ! 
But, O God, I want it to be a good home. It 
must not fail me. O, it must help me to stand ! 
And O, I want it to be founded on the Rock — 
on the Rock ! Yes, brother, on the solid Rock — 
on Christ Jesus — so that when the rain descends 
and the floods come and the winds blow — so 
that when the dreadful storms come — they have 
come upon me before, they will come again — so 



Down Deeper. 75 

that when the great storms of awful trouble 
come down upon it, my home will not be de- 
stroyed." 

Was this the sermon of dedication ? Tears 
ran down the cheeks of the man. His soul 
shook with agitation as he saw the storm coming, 
then driving upon his home, which rose up tri- 
umphantly. Did it not rest on a rock ? After 
this u sermon " of dedication came prayer; 
then the singing of " Nearer, my God, to thee," 
and the services were concluded. The chaplain 
and his assistant now left and took the audience 
also with them. The key was turned in the 
lock of the humble door. The two rooms and 
the little attic and the plain furniture were left 
behind — a humble spot ; and yet did not the 
blessing of God tarry there as really as when 
Solomon dedicated his great temple and the 
glory of the Lord came down in a cloud and 
filled all the house ? 

Would not such a spirit of dedication have 
been blessed to the bookbinder's home in New- 
buryport ? Would his mother's God have failed 
Gough if there bad been a looking up to him ? 
It was a verv serious corner in his life that he 
ws turning; and would he turn it right? 



76 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Blessed the life where God is invoked to stand at 
every corner and by his grace effect a right turn. 
Gough's life, though, was away from God. 
When his intensely social nature asserted itself, 
turning away from the home he had established, 
he turned to an unworthy social circle whose influ- 
ences did not help any inclination to be temper- 
ate. There came another fishing voyage, the 
vessel going out and coming back in safety. 
The soul of John Gough, though tossed on 
this life's w T aves, did not find a harbor of ref- 
uge ; would such ever be sought ? and if desired 
would there be persistency of effort to reach it ? 




Rays of Light, then Darkness. 77 



CHAPTER X. 

RAYS OF LIGHT, THEN DARKNESS. 

IVTEWBURYPORT is a place of strong relig- 
1M ious influences. It believes in churches. 
On a retired street stands an old house of God, 
surrounded by many venerable and cherished 
associations. Outwardly it is a quaint piece of 
architecture, with its two diminutive belfries. 
I have officiated within its walls, and can imag- 
ine myself in its pulpit many years ago waiting 
for the opening of the services. Glancing door- 
ward I can see a young man entering the 
church. His appearance at once interests me. 
He is not nicely dressed. I think he must have 
made a special effort to come to church. I 
fancy his wife has mended any rents in his clothes 
and nicely brushed them. He has a quick, 
sharply glancing eye, and there is a kind of in- 
telligent self-assertion to his air, as if he knew 
that he could be somebody if he wished or had 
a chance. At the same time there is a shy, 
startled look, as if he were not accustomed every 



78 A KNIGHT THAT SMOTE THE D&AGON. 

Sunday to such surroundings, and thought some 
old godless companion might perchance see 
him and wonder why he were there. It is John 
B. Gough. There has been an unusual stirring 
of the sense of obligation within him, for some 
reason, and he has come to church. If he had 
only clung to this rope of the church when go- 
ing down amid the temptations of the city it 
would have held him in safe places. It will 
hold any one of us. It will make a vast differ- 
ence in our lives whether or not we cultivate 
church-going habits. To be found in the house 
of God each Sunday means to be found in the 
place of blessing, where Christ's hand will touch 
us in sympathy and his voice cheer us amid de- 
pression and sorrow. Better still is it not only 
to be inside church walls, but to be a member of 
Christ's great flock. 

When Gough went to the old church the 
Rev. Randolph Campbell was pastor. He was 
a man of very positive opinions, which he knew 
how to heat up and then deliver with energy. 
When Gough heard Mr. Campbell he listened 
to some very straightforward preaching which 
had singular success in finding a man's con- 
science and arousing it. I am not surprised that 



Rays of Light, then Darkness. 79 

Gough for a while tried to do better. Mr. 
Campbell's warm heart went out toward Gough, 
and he welcomed the young man to his house. 
He appreciated Gough's powers, and told him he 
hoped he might yet win an education. 

Those were days of hope in the old city. Good 
angels seemed to fold their wings above the 
young man ; and stooping to him did they whis- 
per words of encouragement ? Rays of light 
were breaking out of a clouded sky. Ah ! it 
w^as young Gough still, with the old gifts, 
bright, witty, enthusiastic, and yet — craving 
the stimulus of alcohol and fond of the social 
circle. The light faded out of the sky and the 
clouds thickened again. Good angels seemed to 
sigh and retreat heavenward. The better things 
awaking in Gough's nature went into an evil 
slumber again. His drinking habits were ag- 
gravated. Work ceased. Poverty pressed closer. 
Hunger was keener. That hunger and want, 
those thin, spectral visitants, should throw so 
thick and dense a shadow in the drunkard's 
home is no contradiction or wonder. In Man- 
chester, England, a working-man was making a 
temperance speech. He held in his hands a knife 
and also a loaf of bread. Drawing the knife 



80 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

across the loaf and taking off a slice of moderate 
size, he said, " This is what you give to the city 
government." He made another and larger sec- 
tion, and added, "And this is what you, give to 
the general government." He now made a 
tremendous slash with his knife that cut away a 
quantity of bread equal to three quarters of the 
entire loaf. "This," he said, "you give to the 
brewer." The remnant after all this amputation 
was only a thin slice. The larger fraction of 
this he allotted to the " public-house," and of 
the few crumbs left he said, " And this you keep 
to support yourself and your family." The 
drunkard's children knew this well. But 
Gough experienced something more cutting 
than hunger. People avoided him. Young 
men he had been the companion of, young 
men, too, who drank but could maintain a 
better appearance than he, gave him the cold 
shoulder. The singer in bar-rooms, the humor- 
ous story-teller, saw that his society was not 
desired now. He requested the company of a 
boy in a walk, and it was refused, the boy say- 
ing his father had warned him against Gough. 
It stung hi in to be neglected. It stung him to 
be virtually placarded " dangerous." To stop 



Rays of Light, then Darkness. SI 

the smart lie would drink. When he came to 
himself again he would soothe his pain with 
another deadly draught. 

The light was vanishing. It seemed to come 
back when a rum-seller did an act of generosity 
you would not expect in one of that trade. No, 
it was an act of justice. This man helped Gongh 
go into business on his own account. As Gough 
had helped support the rum-seller's bar, it was only 
just that the bar should help support Gough's 
bench. Gough might have prospered now, but the 
resources he was furnished with only made fuel 
for those fires that alcohol kindles. Gough, 
being master in his shop, could do as he pleased, 
and his pleasure was to neglect his business and 
gratify the craving for drink. He had one 
solemn warning. A young man whom Gough 
well knew begged for the loan of a coin com- 
mon in the days of my boyhood, a ninepence. 
The money lent was turned into liquor, and the 
liquor was turned into the young man. The 
poor victim of rum begged a second piece 
of money. Gough denied him. While Gough 
was out of his shop, this devotee of the bottle 
swallowed a quantity of spirits of wine which 
Gough found useful in his work. Gough did 



82 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

not see liim again. Very soon after this he 
heard that the voiing man was dead. 

How did he treat this warning ? When Luther, 
the great reformer, was in his earlier days per- 
plexed about his future calling he was travel- 
ing amid the mountains. Storm-clouds gathered 
and darkened above him. The thunder rumbled 
and crashed in heavier and heavier discharges. 
The lightning drew its awful sword of fire in. 
the heavens. There came a blinding flash, and the 
lightning smote down through the sky and buried 
itself in the earth before Luther. He was over- 
whelmed with fear. He fell upon his knees. 
Death seemed to confront him. Eternity 
opened just there. In that supreme moment he 
made a vow which brought to an end all his 
indecision. If God would only shield him from 
this peril he would forsake the world and set 
himself entirely apart to God. Then he began 
to question himself concerning his spiritual con- 
dition, and for a better life sharp now was his 
craving. To carry out his new purpose he was 
inflexibly resolved. He called together the old 
school friends at Erfurth, where he had followed 
learning's pleasant paths. He gave them a sup- 
per. There was music at the gathering. Wit 



Rays of Light, then Darkness. 83 

and mirth were there. Suddenly, at the height 
of the joviality, Luther spoke and announced 
his purpose to give himself to the most serious 
of callings. His gay companions were surprised. 
They strove to reason him out of his purpose. 
He was firm, however. That very night, as if 
afraid that he might change his mind if he 
delayed, he stole away from his lodgings and 
alone went to the convent of the hermits of St. 
Augustine. He knocked at the gate, and it 
opened, and into the convent passed the young 
man who, taught of the Spirit of God, was 
destined to become the great reformer. He 
was at that time not twenty-two years old. He 
met the warning of providence and accepted it. 
It is the only safe course we can follow. It 
is the only course that we should pursue. 

God was not content with sending plain 
warnings to Gough ; there came an invitation. 
The wave of temperance reformation rolled to 
Newburyport one day, and a reformed drunkard 
spoke in the church of which Mr. Campbell was 
pastor. The house was full. But what old- 
young drunkard came with the crowd, with hag- 
gard face, with bleared eyes, and in his poor, 
threadbare clothing ? It was the book-binder, and 



84 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

the speaker's words went like a sharp sword into 
Gough's conscience. I do not wonder that he 
only stayed about ten minutes, but as he was 
passing out of the church a piece of paper 
almost tripped him up and stopped the drunkard 
in his course. It was the temperance pledge 
tendered Gough by a young man. A good im- 
pulse came to Gough as if it were the strong 
touch of an angel, and he did stop and was 
inclined to sign, when it would seem as if an 
evil angel came on the other side of Gough, and, 
as the craving for drink stirred within Gough, 
reminded him that he had a pint of brandy at 
home. Gough hesitated. Gough declined. 
Gough said, though, to himself, he would con- 
sume what liquor he had on hand and then — 
quit ! That was like standing by a hay-mow in 
a barn, holding a card of matches in the 
hand and saying, " I will light these matches 
and touch them to the hay, and then have noth- 
ing more to do with matches in this barn." The 
wave of temperance interest coming to New- 
buryport did not trouble Gough to any serious 
extent. He was worse after this opportunity 
than before it, because he abused it. The lights 
of hope were now going out faster than ever. 



In Still Darker Depths. 85 



CHAPTER XT. 

IN STILL DARKER DEPTHS. 

A DRUNKARD will practice deceit. Alco- 
hol, that deranges the body, dislocates all the 
machinery of a man's moral nature. It may in- 
cline him to lie and to steal, and then it para- 
lyzes the will-power that would prevent him from 
lying and stealing. It is like a train on a track 
where the switches are set wrong, and then some 
one ruins the brakes that would stop the moving 
train ere it makes the wrong turn. In Market 
Square, Newburyport, stood the old town-pump 
that, summer and winter, never refused a drink 
to the applicant who could move its handle. Its 
brimming trough w T as a good friend to dogs and 
horses slaking here their thirst. Be it the be£- 
gar in rags that swmng up and down its handle, 
or the old tar just in from a voyage to the West 
Indies, or the parson in his well-brushed but 
seedy broadcloth, the town -pump never re- 
fused to bring up its cool, clear, crystal water 
when a muscular application was made at the 



86 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

handle. Gougli thought it would be a good 
idea to swell the cold-water column. He did 
not want people to think he never drank any 
thing but rum. So he would come witli his 
pitcher to the old town-pump. But is he not 
looking round to see if any body is near him ? 
Glance into his pitcher. If an adept at sucli 
recognition you will see a pint of new rum in it ! 
Clank, clank, clank, now goes the old squeak- 
ing handle, and down into the book-binder's 
pitcher falls a sparkling cascade, but there is 
never so much water as there is rum in the 
pitcher. Gough goes away, the drops of water, 
like globules of crystal, dripping from the out- 
side of the pitcher. " Guess some folks will see 
that I use water as well as they," I fancy the 
book-binder is saying. If they could only have 
smelt the inside of that pitcher ! He was 
sensitive to public opinion when sober, and de- 
fied it and despised it when drunk. That is the 
consistency of the drunkard's course. At 
Newburyport Gough sank lower and lower. 
His sister had married, and, living at Prov- 
idence and prostrated by sickness, she sent 
for her brother's wife to help her. Gough, thus 
left to himself, felt his loneliness ; but how did 



In Still Darker Depths. 87 

he meet his want of society ? Whose compan- 
ionship did he court ? A gallon of "West India 
rum, and finally another drunkard. What a 
shameful time they had, those three, the gallon 
of rum and the two drunkards ! Gough's com- 
panion at last staggered home, and Gongh was 
left alone with the balance of the rum. . For 
three days the drinking fit continued. One 
night terrible feelings attacked him. He wanted 
to sleep. His thirst being like a furnace, he 
tried to quench it with rum, and he sought also 
to stupefy himself into slumber. Baffied, he 
seized a tobacco-pipe and matches. He could 
not stand upright to kindle the latter, and, pros- 
trate on the bed, he there scratched one against 
the wall and so lighted his pipe. He smoked 
and began to be drowsy. Aroused by a sensa- 
tion of heat, he found that his pillow was burn- 
ing ! He unconsciously had set it on fire. He 
tossed it on the floor, and then fell back into a 
stupid slumber. When he awoke he saw neigh- 
bors in his room, who, attracted by the odor of 
the fire, had rushed in to learn the cause. They 
aroused him and lifted him from the bed, in 
whose straw was a smoldering fire ! A while 
longer, and he might have become a cinder. The 



88 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

accident shocked him, and still — he drank. A 
horrible agony followed. He sent for the doc- 
tor. "When the physician came the drunkard did 
not want to meet him, but he could not avoid 
the doctor, who ordered Gouglrs friends to 
watch the drunkard and deny him liquor. 

The " horrors," in English, " delirium tre- 
mens" in Latin, but in both languages an awful 
penalty for sin, now set in. Gough was at the 
bottom of those depths down through which he 
had been plunging. Do we understand what is 
meant by this awful and penal visitation? 
Gough, in later years, in an anniversary address,** 
May 6, 1875, before the National Temperance 
Society, relates this case : " A gentleman said to 
me last winter, ' It seems hard that drink should 
come into my house when I have been fighting 
it. I have a family of six children, four daugh- 
ters being married. My youngest son is twenty- 
six years of age ; he has had delirium tremens 
twice, and is dying.' The physician, who related 
to me many of the circumstances of the case, 
sat by his side and said to him, ' Charley, you 
know me and know that I am your friend. Now, 

* John B. Gough, His Anniversary Address, p. 33, National 
Temperance Societv. 



In Still Darker Depths. 89 

my dear fellow, you have a terrible time before 
you ; you have to suffer intolerably for ten days 
or a fortnight. I think I can see my way clear 
to get you on your feet and save your life. If 
I get you on your feet and you touch liquor 
again, do not send for me.' The young man 
looked in his face and said, ' Doctor, you say I 
have to suffer. What do you know about it ? 
Doctor, it is coming on me ! I can feel it com- 
ing ! What do you know about it ? You could 
describe it, I suppose. You could tell your class 
in a medical school all about it. You could tell 
them how you amputated a limb, but could you 
tell them how the man felt when the saw touched 
the marrow ? Doctor, if you can prove to me 
there is no physical suffering in hell I will cut 
my throat, for there is no mental anguish to 
compare with what I know I have got to go 
through. Doctor, I have had great spiders draw 
their soft webs all over my face and in my 
mouth. I have had green flies buzz in my ears 
and crawl up my nostrils and creep across my 
eyelashes. Ah, keep them off, doctor ! ' Yes, 
'it' was coming ! O. it was that awful tiling 
coming, the 'horrors' even, rushing at him! 
The narrator went on to say, ' In less than three 



90 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

minutes two men were holding him down.' 
When he got on his feet he was weak and worn 
and wasted. He walked with two sticks, just 
able to keep himself up. On the third day lie 
was out and went into a saloon exclaiming, ' Give 
me a little brandy, just a tablespoonful, not 
much. Don't tell any body any thing about it ; 
it will do me good.' The man gave it to him. 
' And now,' said the father, ' that boy of mine is 
dying.' " 

Such was the outline of the experience of 
one who knew what the figlit with, alcohol 
was when it hurled at him all the agony of 
the " horrors." Into that awful pit, that chasm 
of darkness, peopled with snakes, dragons, tigers, 
demons, Gough, not an old drunkard, but still a 
young man, was now driven by the delirium 
tremens. It was blinding fire and then awful 
darkness. He seemed to be plunging down, 
down, down, into fearful depths where demons 
leered and frowned at him. Out of his contor- 
tions he would come so weak, all vitality seem- 
ingly gone, helplessly lying on his bed, as if he 
had been thrown there after violent wrestlings 
with a wild beast ; and then would spring at him 
the awful thought that these terrors would begin 



In Still Darker Depths. 91 

again. When Gough crawled out of his den of 
nightmares he thought of her who had been a 
mother and a counselor to him. That praying 
mother ! What had he done with her counsels ? 
What a difference in his life it would have made 
if he had always shown that regard for a moth- 
er's teachings displayed by a certain drummer- 
boy ! A favorite with the officers, he was invited 
by the captain to take a glass of rum. He re- 
fused, alleging, "I am a cadet of temperance, 
and do not taste strong drink." 

" But you must take some now," urged the 
captain. " You have been on duty all day, beat- 
ing the drum and marching, and now you must 
not refuse. I insist upon it." 

The boy, though, was resolute and still de- 
clined. 

" Our little drummer-boy is afraid to drink," 
remarked the captain. " He will never make a 
soldier." This he said to the major. 

"How is this?" said the major, jokingly. 
" Do you refuse to obey the orders of your cap- 
tain ? " 

" Sir," said the bov, " I have never refused to 
obey the captain's orders, and have tried to do 
my duty as a soldier faithfully ; but I must re- 



92 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

fuse to drink rum because I know it will do me 
an injury." 

" Then," said the major, gravely, wishing to 
try the boy, " 1 command you to take a drink, 
and you know it is death to disobey orders." 

The boy looked straight into the face of the 
officer, saying, " Sir, my father died a drunkard, 
and when I entered the army I promised my 
dear mother that I would not take a drop of 
rum, and I mean to keep my promise. I am 
sorry to disobey orders, sir ; but I would rather 
suffer any thing than disgrace my mother and 
break my temperance pledge." 

Could any thing be said after that by major 
or major-general even ? The boy's course was 
approved by his officers, and he was encouraged 
to be steadfast. 

John Gough could not forget his mother's 
counsels. In moments of heart-searching he 
plainly saw his sin and earnestly determined he 
would do better. For a month he lived away 
from the rum-bottle. "What a sign of his ability 
to do a grand work for himself all this seemed ! 
The next experience, what a sign of his inability 
to do this work in his own strength! His wife 
came home. In his happiness at her return, 



In Still Darker Depths. 93 

thinking that Gough was master and Rum was 
servant, lie indulged in a glass of brandy. It 
was the first impulse again toward the bottom of 
the precipice up which he had painfully climbed. 
After the first glass came the second, and then 
another, and he went to sleep that night of his 
wife's return — drunk. He was again at his cups. 

The intemperate book-binder had his sea- 
sons of reform. Does one ask why he did 
not succeed ? A reformed man gave this testi- 
mony : " I never went to bed sober for ten 
years. The paper on which I've written down 
the words ' I'll quit drink ' would cover all that 
side of this large hall. But there was One who 
could help me not to drink, and who can help 
every man — just one — the Lord Jesus Christ." 

That testimony is corroborated by this fact : 
A drinking man, one confirmed in the habit, 
was about to go off on a fishing cruise. He sug- 
gested to another fisherman that before leaving 
they should "take a drink." 

" No," was the answer, " I don't drink." 

" Don't you drink any thing ? " 

" No, I don't drink any thing." 

" Why not ? " 

" Because I am a Christian." 



94 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

" What ! " asked the first man. " Does Christ 
keep you from drinking?" 

u Yes, Christ keeps me from drinking," 

These words made a deep impression on the 
mind of the drunkard. He said to himself, 
" There is help that I didn't think of." Going 
home, reaching his room, kneeling down, he 
pleaded, " O, Lord Jesus Christ, keep me from 
drinking ! " Above him was a divine face ten- 
derly looking down, and around him was thrown 
a divine arm that held him up and kept him 
from drinking. When would Gough look up to 
that pitying face and lean on that strengthening 
arm ? 

The book-binder was now to become some- 
thing else. He changed his plans for daily work. 
He had several times during his Newburyport 
life sung at concerts in different towns, and he 
now engaged to assist in showing the public 
how the battle of Bunker Hill was fought. It 
was a very peaceful kind of fighting called a dio- 
rama. Gough traveled about with these show- 
heroes of Bunker Hill. His employer retained 
him, though Gough persisted in lugging along 
the bottle for a companion. Finally Worces- 
ter was reached, that beautiful inland city of 



In Still Darker Depths. 95 

Massachusetts, destined to play a very im- 
portant part in Gough's life. It was October. 
The hills and valleys were brilliant with color, 
as if England's scarlet-coats at Bunker Hill were 
marching up and down the country maneuver- 
ing for another battle. Gough determined he 
would quit drinking. He resolved also to send 
for his wife, that long-suffering woman, and he 
inclosed in his letter his purpose to begin a tem- 
perate life. The evening she reached Worces- 
ter, when he met her, he showed her how well 
he could keep his promise ; he met her — drunk ! 
Gough soon left the heroes of Bunker Hill and 
obtained work and — still drank. His employers 
were told that he had been off on a spree,. and 
they threatened to discharge him. His wife was 
now sick, and her sickness and that threat so- 
bered him. Again he said he would reform and 
— did not. His wife's sickness became very 
serious. Still he drank. His wife and child 
that had been given him both died. Still he 
drank. He was in an awful world. Smitten 
with a sharp sense of loneliness, yet drinking 
while the dead lay under his roof! In the gloom 
of the night he would creep to those silent ones. 
In his despairing solitude his trembling hand 



96 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

would touch those still faces, and then, going 
back to his couch, he would lift the poisoning bot- 
tle to his lips. After the funeral services shame 
and despair were more intense. Society spurned 
him. Work he had, but it was under restric- 
tions. He felt galled, crushed, hopeless. Still 
he drank. He would have liquor. He owned 
various books and a few souvenirs. These he 
sold for rum. What will a man not part with 
that he may obtain rum ? To get it, what meth- 
ods he may resort to ! Under the influence of 
it, to what deeds he may be solicited ! In the 
East they tell of a man who was met by one of 
the genii, a fabulous class of beings more pow- 
erful than men, and the choice of three evils 
was given him. He could commit murder, he 
could steal, he could get drunk. The man nat- 
urally did not wish to be guilty of crime. He 
thought he would submit to the least evil — he 
would get drunk. When he was intoxicated, 
though, the drunken fool both stole and mur- 
dered ! 

When various sources of rum-supply failed 
Gough he did this. There was his old knack at 
story-telling ; there were his powers of mimicry ; 
there w r as his gift of song. He would turn into 



In Still Darker Depths. 97 

some despicable grog shop and there sing a hu- 
morous song or tell stories or in some other 
way use his power to entertain, and the bois- 
terous, applauding auditors would pay him in 
drink. 

Conscience, though, was not dead. Affection 
had not ceased to throb in his bosom. In the 
midst of the maudlin shouts of the grog-shop 
he would see his mother as she tried to win him 
out of these chains. Hour after hour, in the 
darkness of the night, did he lie on his wife's 
grave. Haunted by unhappy memories, pursued 
by a guilty conscience, driven by the horrible 
desire for liquor, without home, without friends, 
it is no wonder that once he went to the railroad 
track, a bottle of laudanum his companion, med- 
itating suicide. The stupefying poison had 
reached his lips when he stopped. It was that 
pause which saved him. (rough was not the 
only one who has visited the railroad track pur- 
posing self-destruction. A poor fellow was 
found dead one day, terribly mangled, on the 
track of one of our railroads. He had deliber- 
ately selected a spot in a twist of the iron road 
where the engineer could not detect him until it 
was too late to stay his purpose. Prostrate he 



98 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

awaited death, and it came, driving, roaring, 
crushing. Among his clothes was found a con- 
fession which he had prepared. He told why 
he had selected that spot, saying he could not be 
seen until it was " too late to stop the engine. 
Thus I shall go out of the world with a rush. I 
have fortified myself with some forty-rod whis- 
ky which I got at the Hollow, where may be 
found more of the same sort. Whoever finds 
my dead body and this paper, will know who I 
am. Send my personal effects to my wife, Mrs. 

, in . I did this by my own hand. 

Rum is the cause. I have but one regret ; that 
is my wife, for she has been a w T ife to me in 
every sense of the word. But I cannot live any 
longer, for I am tired of life. So, now, fare- 
well to the world." There followed other words, 
and araons: them was a reference to a brother : 
u I hope he will shed one tear in memory, and 
then let me be forgotten ! " He closed with 
this pitiful outcry : " Father, I wish I could live 
to fulfill your hopes and wishes, but I cannot ! 
O, rum, rum, rum !" 

What influence kept Gougli from suicide 
as he stood by the railroad track ? Did some 
good angel lay a restraining hand on his arm 



In Still Darker Depths. 99 

when he raised that bottle of benumbing poison 
to his lips ? I know that angels do minister to 
the needy of earth. Gough turned away from 
that selected place of death, but what would 
he do? If he did not die under the wheels of 
the locomotive, he seemed to be fated to perish 
before that pitiless demon drink. 

The last Sunday of October has come. How 
chilly are the streets of Worcester ! The sharp 
evening wind rustles and sweeps aside the dead 
leaves of autumn. A drunkard, who feels the 
sting of the wind, comes sauntering along. He 
has been drinking and is under the influence of 
liquor still, but he is not insensible to a kind 
word or a cross one that may be spoken. He 
can appreciate a touch of sympathy or a rough 
hand of restraint. He feels his loneliness, for 
he is without a home. He feels his uselessness 
in life, for he is without any serious purpose. 
He shrugs his shoulders, for cutting is the w T ind 
and his clothing is scanty and shabby. It is not 
any despondency of old age that burdens him. 
He is young and yet nigh unto despair, for he 
is a drunkard. As you look, you can see through 
the shadows that gloomy face. You can hear 
the uncertain, uneven walk of this drunkard. 



100 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

This very night John Bartholomew Gougli 
is to come under the influence of a movement 
destined to revolutionize his life. What will be 
its character ? 

October ! It is not a month when the gardener 
looks for hopeful beginnings. It is harvest- 
time, not seed-time. 

A drunkard's life ! It offers to the eye but 
little hope. God, though, reigns. 




A Friendly Hand. 101 



CHAPTER XTT. 

A FRIENDLY HAND. 

TTES, what will be the nature of this re vol u- 
-L tionary influence in Gough's life ? He is 
to be stopped in his career. Shall he feel a hand 
of violence or that of kindness and sympathy ? 

Some men cease tobecome drunkards when they 
become convicts. It may, in one way, be a great 
blessing to a man when he steps into the shadow 
of such a shame as imprisonment. A physician 
was asked by a man if he could cure a malady 
of his eyes. " Yes," said the doctor, "if you 
will follow my prescription." " O, certainly, 
doctor," said the patient. " I will do any thing 
to have my eyes cured. "What is your remedy, 
doctor?" "You must steal a horse," said the 
doctor, gravely. " Steal a horse, doctor ? " cried 
the astonished patient. " How will that cure 
my eyes ? " " You will be sent to the State 
prison for five years, where you cannot get 
whisky, and during your incarceration your eyes 
would get well." was the physician's answer. 



102 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

The man with the sick eyes tested not the worth 
of this prescription, but if he had it would have 
been a sure cure. Is Gough to try what strong 
walls can do for him ? As you watcli him stag- 
gering along the sidewalk, is an officer to spring 
upon him, handcuff him if need be, and carry 
him off to the lock-up ? There is another influ- 
ence besides that of rough hands which will re- 
strain men. 

There was an old drunkard known as " Bill 
Strong." Who ever thought that " Bill Strong" 
could be saved? Somebody, though, had that 
opinion. One morning the barkeeper whom 
Bill Strong patronized led forward a lady, and, 
pointing at the old drunkard seated at a pine- 
table, said, " That's Bill Strong, ma'am," and 
left the two together. 

" Am I rightly informed ? Do I address Mr. 
"William Strong ? " she asked, in a sweet tone of 
voice, glancing pityingly at the drunkard's face. 
Mr. William Strong ! Was that the man's name ? 
He was not used to it, and yet it pleased him to 
hear this title of a respected manhood applied to 
him; 

" Yes, that is my name, ma'am," replied the 
drunkard, stealing a look at his clothing, which 



A Friendly Hand. 103 

needed rejuvenating. He even attempted to 
cover up a ruptured elbow of his coat. 

" I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Strong," 
said the lady. " I have heard my father speak 
of you so often, and of the days when you and 
he were boys together, that I almost feel as if 
we were old acquaintances." 

She continued the conversation. And what 
came of this interview ? There was a certain 
document which she offered, and he attached his 
name. " Bill Strong?" No, but "William 
Strong," under the temperance pledge. It was 
the friendly hand that reached the old drunkard. 

That was to be God's method for reaching 
Gough — a friendly hand. That bleak October 
night, when he was stumbling along without 
home or hope, he felt a pressure on his shoul- 
der. Startled, he turned and looked at the per- 
son who had laid a hand on him. Instinctively 
he felt that it was the touch of a kind friend, for 
with the touch went a friendly voice. It was 
not the stern address of a policeman who has 
grasped a rogue. To this extent Gough had no 
difficulty in interpreting the meaning of this de- 
tention by a stranger that October night, chilling 
and lonely. But what else did the touch signify ? 



104 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Gough was imagining what the stranger's er- 
rand might be. 

" Mr. Gough, I believe ? " said the man. 

u That is my name/' was the reply, and 
Gough would have left him. 

" You have been drinking to-day." 

This remark was a serious charge, and it might 
have provoked the person accused, but, often- 
times, it is not the thing said so much as the way 
it is said which does harm. This person's manner 
was very kindly. 

" Yes, sir, I have," was Gough's frank re- 

" Why do you not sign the pledge ? " asked 
the stranger. 

Again Gough gave a frank answer that he did 
not hope ever to be a sober man, that there was 
nobody who cared for him or what became of 
him, that he did not expect to live long, and he 
did not care how soon he died, whether also he 
was drunk at the time or sober. Gough was 
reckless, and plainly told his interlocutor so. 
The man was not to be discouraged. In a broth- 
erly way he took the drunkard's arm and asked 
him how he would like to go back to his old 
antecedents, to be honored, suitably clothed, at- 



A Fiuendly Hand. 105 

tending church, on the old footing among friends, 
a man that was of use in society ? 

" O," answered Gough, " I should like all 
these things first-rate, but I have no expectation 
that such a tiling will ever happen. Such a 
change cannot be possible." 

" Only sign our pledge," was the reply to 
Gough, "and I will warrant that it shall be so. 
Sign it and I will introduce you myself to good 
friends who will feel an interest in your welfare 
and take a pleasure in helping you to keep your 
good resolutions. Only, Mr. Gough, sign the 
pledge and all will be as I have said, aye, and 
more too." 

It may seem singular, but the interest of 
Gough was greatly aroused. That which deep- 
ened Gondii's interest was the stranger's kind- 
ness of manner, and was the future this man 
had painted an impossibility ? Could Gough 
deny it ? 

He determined to make the effort. 

"Well, I will sign it," was his answer. 

"When?" 

" I cannot do so to-night — " 

He now added a strange reason, but it shows 
the contradiction between the impulses of the 



106 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

drunkard's appetite and the convictions of his 
better nature. " For I must have some more 
drink presently, but I certainly will to-morrow," 
added Gough. 

Some people might have been so discouraged 
at this answer as to turn away in despair. What 
if a man on a raft drifting toward Niagara Falls, 
and urged by friends to leave it for a boat that 
will take him to the shore, should say, " I will 
just stay and give my raft a few more shoves 
toward the falls, and farther down the stream I 
will quit the raft ? " The stranger was not dis- 
couraged. He held on to his man. 

"We have a temperance meeting to-morrow 
evening," he said ; " will yon sign it then ? " 

"I will." 

"That is right. I will be there to see you." 
As he spoke he seized Gough's hand. 

" You shall," Gough assured his new friend. 

As Gough turned away he reflected, " If it 
should be the last act of my life, I will perform 
my promise and sign it, even though I die in 
the attempt ; for that man has placed confidence 
in me, and on that account I love him." 

Still, Gough must have his liquor first. He 
must drift still nearer the fatal cataract of drink 



A Friendly Hand. 107 

before leaving the place of danger ! Inside of 
half* an hour he had put himself outside of four 
glasses of brandy quaffed at a vile ruin-hole! 
He went home drunk, and on his bed was stu- 
pidly unconscious all that night. When he 
awoke, the very first recollection coming to him 
was that of his promise to become a temperance 
man. What had he done ? He almost regretted 
the hasty step. Besides, the furnace in his body 
was crying for fuel. He felt so miserably that 
he concluded he must drink. He went out to a 
hotel and imbibed a quantity of " bitters." He 
passed to his customary duties, but he could not 
forget that promise about the pledge. What 
would he do ? Appetite strengthened as the 
time drew near for its promised subjection. At 
noon he swallowed a glass »of the liquor for 
which his body had so intense a craving, and yet 
he was going to the temperance meeting that 
night! He was resolved, as the dark deepened, 
to go and keep his promise. That night the 
rally was to be in the so-called lower Town Hall, 
Worcester. Let us go also and be on the look- 
out for the book-binder. 

The people are coining in, of all ages 
except the very oldest and very youngest. 



10S A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Under the old coats, under the worn shawls, and 
under coats and shawls not old and worn, how 
many hopes and fears have a lodging-place! In 
every temperance meeting how many anxious 
hearts are present ! How many sad, serious mis- 
givings there are ! "What if this one should not 
sign the pledge, or, if one has signed, what if 
there may have been a fall, and his place now 
be vacant? The meeting has begun. All faces 
are turned toward the person who presides. 
Where is Gough % You don't see him. Has he 
not come ? There, is no one present that you 
think is Gough. Can he have failed to keep his 
word? The meeting goes on. Who is that 
standing up to speak? He is a young man, but 
a sorry-looking one. His faded brown overcoat 
he has buttoned up to the chin, as if he wanted 
to hide his very poor clothes beneath. He is 
not used to this work of addressing temperance 
meetings. He is agitated and nervous. You 
infer that there is a good deal of trembling un- 
der that old brown coat. He has caught the eye 
of a man who is smiling at him, and it encour- 
ages him. This smiling face down in the au- 
dience looks like that of a man who stopped a 
boor drunkard in the street last night and asked 



A Friendly Hand. 109 

him, in a kind, sympathetic way, to quit drink- 
ing. We shall find out who it is. The speaker 
goes on, much agitated and yet resolute to tell 
his story. It is the old story of the ruin that 
rum had wrought. He says he has promised to 
sign the pledge and he will now proceed to do 
it. His hand shakes. His letters are uneven, 
but there is his name on the pledge. Look at 
it— " John B. Gough ! " 

Sensitive he must have been as to his appear- 
ance and action, but he could not appreciate 
these as another could. I find in a "Worcester 
paper* this statement: 

"How well many remember that pale, hag- 
gard face, the long, flowing, unkempt hair of 
raven blackness, which Gough nervously pushed 
back from his forehead as he entered the meet- 
ing. His coat was buttoned at the top only. A 
crowd of those who had laughed at his baccha- 
nalian songs, his wonderful powers of mimicry, 
and his grotesque dancing had followed him 
into the meeting. As he nervously affixed his 
signature to the pledge a half-suppressed, sneer- 
ing laugh was heard by those in the rear of the 
hall. Gough heard it also, and, as he laid down 

* Worcester Spy, February 26, 1886. 



110 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

the pen, lie turned suddenly upon those assem- 
bled with, 'Why do you laugh? Am I not a 
man V " 

Those who heard his words that night long 
remembered them. 

The manhood within him was aroused at last, 
breaking away from its chains and asserting 
itself. 

People in that far-away temperance meeting, 
back in the history of a previous generation, 
were moved to tears. What an event, not sim- 
ply in Gough's life, but in its relation to other 
lives ! Thousands signed when that one man 
w T rote down his name. Thousands began to drop 
their chains when he stooped to wrench off and 
throw away his fetters. Through that shabbily 
clad young speaker how many would be brought 
out of the bondage of rum into the glorious lib- 
erty of total abstinence ! 

There were friends of Gough who rejoiced 
over the stand he was taking. There in the au- 
dience was the man who had sent up to him a 
smile of recognition when he began to speak, the 
man who, the night before, had asked him to 
attend this meeting, Joel Stratton. What an 
evening of victory and joy it was for him! 



A Friendly Hand. Ill 

I am thinking, too. of another friend, Gough' s 
mother. Some good angel, singing all the way, 
must have flown skyward to carry home to that 
mother the tidings that " John"' had signed the 
pledge. 

But what a night for the son followed this 
step ! His will but not his appetite had con- 
sented to that pledge-signature. Such a burning 
thirst as he took with him from his bed in the 
morning! He w r as determined, though, to be 
true to his promise. It was a hard day, and so 
long! True, he had shattered many purposes 
to reform, but he was sincerely trying again, and 
he wished his employers to know that he had 
signed the pledge, and he told one of the gen- 
tlemen in the shop what step he had taken. 
Yes, John B. Gough, slave to rum, could say 
that he had signed that pledge which might 
mean emancipation. 

" I know you have," was the reply. 
" And I mean to keep it," said Gough. 
" So they all say, and I hope you will." 
Gough re-assured him of his purpose, and said : 
"You have no confidence in me, sir." 
What an encouraging answer the employer 
now made ! 



112 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

"None whatever, but I hope you will keep 
your pledge." 

It was not like Joel Stratton's confidence in 
Gough. He went back to his work. He was 
discouraged. He saw how he was regarded by 
others. The sky, that had besnin to brighten 
with a star of hope, was clouding again. While 
somberly meditating, Gough heard a voice near 
him. Somebody was speaking to him. 

" Good-morning, Mr. Gough," said a gentle- 
man whose approacli Gough had not noticed. 
"I was very glad to see you take the position 
you did last night, and so were many of our 
temperance friends. It is just such men as you 
that we want, and I have no doubt but you will 
be the means of doing the cause a great deal of 
good." 

The clouds were off the sky and the star of 
hope was back in its place. 

The speaker was a Worcester lawyer, Jesse 
W. Goodrich. He added, " My office is at the 
Exchange, Mr. Gough, and I shall be very happy 
to see you whenever you like to call in — very 
happy." 

Gough had a sensitive nature, and there was 
a peculiar susceptibility to a kind or an unkind 



A Friendly Hand. 113 

word at this time. Somebody did care for him, 
two, indeed, Mr. Stratton and Mr. Goodrich. 
The thought of such kindly interest was as refresh- 
ing and reviving as a summer shower to a droop- 
ing plant. The book-binder must have held up 
his head after that. However, Gough was not 
past his troubles yet. Alcohol will not relax its 
hold upon its victims easily. There was a fight 
before the reformed book-binder. To go with- 
out alcohol was a rare thing for him, and the 
body burned for the poison that was killing it. 
It was death to drink ; it must have seemed like 
death to stop drinking. Gough went home at 
night burdened with a consciousness of some 
threatened horror. There was his terrible thirst 
which water did not seem to lessen but aggravate. 
What he anticipated was another attack of the 
horrors. There was a frightful suggestion of it 
at the book-bindery. It was the evening suc- 
ceeding that of the pledge-signing, and Gough 
wished to screw up the press for binding. He 
had grasped a bar of iron. Was Gough a magi- 
cian ? Could he convert iron into flesh and blood, 
even slimy flesh and cold blood, a thing that 
could twist and try to wriggle away from him, 
a snake? He let it go quickly, this repulsive, 



114 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

wriggling snake! Then it changed to iron. 
There was the bar for screwing up the binding- 
press. That was all. Gough felt that he was 
on the edge of a frightful battle, and his fears 
were realized. When in his chamber he had an 
awful wrestle with the grim forces of the deliri- 
um tremens. There were ugly faces, loathsome 
reptiles, lurid light, blackness, pitiful screams 
for life. However, he held to his purpose. He 
fought victoriously the battle. He left the field 
feeble in body but a conqueror. His health was 
strengthened, little by little, and the stars of 
hope in his sky multiplied and brightened. 

He spoke again at a temperance meeting, and 
the impression made was so good that a Mr. 
Fowler, of Upton, engaged him to give an ad- 
dress. It was about this time that a very impor- 
tant step was taken. 



A Knight Created. 115 



CFIAPTEE XIII. 

A KNIGHT CREATED. 

DO we remember what w T as said about Sand- 
gate Castle, that old haunt of chivalry by 
the frothing sea ? As our thoughts drift back 
to the far-away days w T e recall in imagination 
the princely displays of gay knight and stately 
cavalier that old Sandgate must have witnessed. 
What ceremonies attended the making of those 
knights I know not, but in the eleventh century 
a very imposing ceremonial accompanied such an 
act. In that century, when a person was to be 
made knight, very serious confession preceded 
it, and if every candidate frankly and fully told 
the story of his life the confessional must have 
echoed to very strange revelations. There was 
a midnight vigil in church, and we can see the 
dim, shadowy interior, the tapers faintly burning, 
and the bowed form of the suppliant candidate. 
The communion w r as afterward administered. 
The warrior presented his sword, which was laid 
upon the altar. This meant its consecration and 



116 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

his also to the cause of the Church, and with 
this was joined necessarily a resolution to de- 
vote himself to a godly life. A sum of money 
must be paid that the sword could be taken from 
the altar. Then a blessing was said over it, and 
the highest in the ministry that might be present 
girded it about the would-be knight. His spurs 
were also fastened to him. A blow was now 
given him on the shoulder or cheek. It signi- 
fied the last affront he would suffer without any 
return for it. The latter purpose has a strange 
sound to ears that have heard the gospel of the 
Sermon on the Mount. Doubtless it is explained 
by the after vow which bound him to right 
all wrong. He was pledged to stand up for the 
down-trodden against any oppressor, to stand 
up for the right, no matter what odds might 
be against him, and never, by any act or utter- 
ance even, to blot his fair name as a knight or 
servant of Christ. Wow let him rise and leave 
priest and altar and shadowy church behind him 
and go out to put down wrong, and put up the 
right, to stand by the side of every weak, assailed, 
injured creature. If he only keep his vow, the 
world in such rough, dark days will be rich in 
the possession of a pure, strong character. 



A Knight Created. 117 

There is a knight to be created over here in 
America. It is not the eleventh but the nine- 
teenth century. It is not England, but Massachu- 
setts. We will start in the twilight to find the 
man. He is in that building ahead. A church? 
No, only a school-house on so-called Burncoat 
Plain. We enter, and we confront a crowd 
packed among the benches, squeezed into cor- 
ners, sitting anywhere. It is a chilly night, and 
in the wood stove of a school-house we all know 
what a fire can be made and is made on raw, 
bleak days. The big pile of wood furnished 
by "the deestrick" is close at hand, and carriers 
of wood abound. The school-house stove is on 
duty and rapidly warms up to its tropical 
work. There is the candidate not near any altar, 
but near that fiery stove. He wears not any gay 
♦trappings. He has not been able to buy a decent 
suit of clothes, and his aged overcoat must do 
service as a concealer of his shabbiness. This 
coat-screen comes high up, buttoned to the very 
chin. He has not brought any sword or any spurs. 
His is to be a warfare of entreaty and prayer. 
Like all the knights in such a service, he 
must go afoot, or in very simple fashion if rid- 
ing. And the ceremony of knighthood is just — 



118 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

a talk. There is no slap on the cheek or shoulder, 
though, he may expect to get the like sometime, 
and all he can do, probably, will be to. quietly 
stand and submissively take it. There is no 
priest to bind sword and spur, and only these 
people are here who live in the vicinity of the 
school-house on Burncoat Plain. Plain folks are 
here ; not because of their residence in this level 
neighborhood, do I mean, but simple, unpretend- 
ing, every-day people. These are anxious to 
hear the speecli of the new knight, and though 
he would like to get away from that fiery stove 
the crowd prevent him. He must stand there, 
fire up with his subject, stand also the fire with- 
out, and — roast. It would never do to unbutton 
the old overcoat and reveal the sorry condition 
of his clothes. So he speaks on. He talks 
about temperance. He consecrates himself to 
it. He pledges to do his best for total absti- 
nence. He urges his hearers also to espouse it. 

I do not imagine that John B. Gongh had 
any idea that in the school-house a knight was 
receiving his consecration to temperance. I do 
not think that his spectators, auditors who with 
staring eyes and gaping mouths followed him 
in the course of his thought down into the shud- 



A Knight Created. 119 

dering depths of drunkenness, then up to the 
heights of abstinence, had any idea that these 
first efforts of Gough were a divine setting-apart 
to a wonderful crusade against rum, that great 
despot enslaving so many bondmen. We start 
many movements little knowing their signifi- 
cance. When a late Vice-President of the 
United States, Henry Wilson, as a yonng man 
came tramping down in his poverty from ISTew 
Hampshire to Massachusetts, he did not know it 
was the beginning of a march whose last stages 
would take him to the chair of the vice-presi- 
dency at Washington. He went to work shoe- 
making, stuck to it, rose from a shoe-makers 
bench to a legislator's, kept rising, till he occupied 
a very lofty chair in the nation's gift. 

So we follow our hero in the instance of this 
story, from the school-house to another unpreten- 
tious place of gathering, where he repeats his 
knightly vow of abstinence, where he pledges 
himself to the championship of this cause. In 
all these places it is a true knighthood that is 
espoused ; but who appreciates its significance ? 
Our hero himself, John Bartholomew Gough, 
knows not what future is before him as he speaks 
there by the hot fire in the school-house stove at 



120 A Knight that Smote the D it agon. 

Burncoat Plain. He has a story to tell, and lie 
must tell it, not daring in his poverty to lessen 
his hot discomfort by loosening his overcoat. 
"When he speaks again and again, and makes 
vows truly knightly, he has no idea that he is 
consecrating himself to a great world-effort, that 
the platform will become his triumphant and 
final field. He wishes to do good, and hopes that 
his voice may reach some who may need his help. 
Let us keep clearly in mind the date of 
these first efforts, the latter part of the year 
1842. Gongh was only twenty-five years old. 
Requests for his services were so numerous that 
to answer them he asked his employers to allow 
him to be away a week or two. They consented, 
and he left on his bench a lot of Bibles. They 
were not finished, and he never came back to 
conclude his task. He w T as now giving almost 
all his time to his appeals for temperance. His 
voice was heard ringing out its warnings in 
many towns in Worcester County. He was soon, 
though, to run into a very mortifying experi- 
ence. He was hard at work making temperance 
addresses. It must not be forgotten that his 
appetite for liquor, though smothered, was not 
dead. No one of us can fairly iud^e the inten- 



A Knight Created. 121 

sity of the rum-thirst unless we have acquired 
it. It is not a natural appetite. The craving is 
unnatural and a symptom of disease. That is 
the work of the poison, alcohol, on the human 
system. Temperance was up in Gougli's brain, 
but disease was still down in his body. 

One to whom the care of a widow's son had been 
committed said that the young man had heard 
during his educational course that the use of 
w r ine was not only proper, but it actually aided 
the temperance cause. This nonsense the 
young man accepted as good counsel and acted 
in accordance with it. A few years went by. 

One night, without ceremony, he rushed into 
the room of the friend in whose care he was 
once placed and made a sad confession. He 
said he had been told during his senior year (in 
college) that it was safe to drink wine. That 
idea had ruined him. His friend asked if his 
mother were aware of this. No, she was igno- 
rant of a sin he had solicitously covered up. He 
was asked if he were such a slave that he could 
not give up the habit. 

" Talk not to me of slavery ! " said he. " I am 
ruined, and before I go to bed I shall quarrel 
with the barkeeper of the for brandy or 



122 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

gin to sate my burning thirst." In a month this 
young devotee of alcohol was dead. That is the 
kind of appetite Gough was fighting with. When 
he quit drink, whose excitement for years he was 
familiar with, he missed it. That was not strange 
when we remember the nature of alcohol. 

A writer in the Union Signal thus testifies to 
the strength of Gough's appetite, declaring that 
" his was a life of fierce conflict," that to " souls 
it is sometimes given to have the appetite 
for strong drink taken away, but not so 
was it with Gough. God saw fit to make him 
' perfect through suffering,' and, through un- 
ceasing conflict with the old appetite, kept him 
from forgetting how fierce is the conflict and 
how alone victory can be won. This is one se- 
cret of his power to save men. 

******* 

"About ten years ago an intimate friend of Mr. 
Gough related to me an incident illustrating this 
point. They were neighbors, accustomed to go 
back and forth between each other's houses with 
very little ceremony. One warm day in summer 
when the doors stood open, Mr. A. went to Mr. 
Gough's. His tap on the door not being an- 
swered, he walked through the hall into the sit- 



A Knight Created. 123 

ting-room. There lay Mr. Gongh stretched out 
on the sofa, his face covered witli his hands. His 
wife sat at the window, apparently reading, but 
a glance showed that her paper was upside down, 
and there was such a look of agony on her face 
Mr. A. exclaimed, ' What is the matter, Mary? ' 
She made no answer, but Mr. Gough, uncover- 
ing his face, stretched out his hand to his friend, 
and when Mr. A.'s hand was placed in it, grasped 
it like a vise. ' You think I care for you, Ed- 
ward ? ' he said. ' You have given me too many 
proofs of your affection for me to doubt it, 5 
replied his friend. ' And you think I love that 
little woman sitting over there ? ' said Mr. Gough, 
pointing to his wife. 'I am sure you do, John, 
better than your life.' ' Yet,' said Mr. Gongh, 
and the beaded drops on his forehead told how 
great was his agony, ' I would see you both dead 
at my feet for the sake of a glass of whisky.' 
For hours that awful conflict went on and that 
heroic soul battled alone. Friend nor even wife 
could enter the conflict with him. Yet not alone 
was he. One like unto the Son of God was with 
him in the flames and brought him out with not 
even the smell of fire upon his garments." * 

* Union Signal, Gough Memorial, April 8, 18S6. 



124 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

No one believes that Gough would have 
sacrificed any body that he might gratify his 
appetite, but this ebullition of desire was a 
proof of fierce temptation. Let us not then for- 
get how sharp was the craving of Gough for 
alcohol as we return to watch his early experi- 
ence. He had a very nervous temperament, and 
he was working hard in the cause that had saved 
him and which he knew could save others. He 
had a list, thirty towns long, recording his future 
engagements, and he came to Worcester. His 
head was troubling him. When a boy he met 
with an accident to his head, and this now gave 
him trouble. He appeared strangely. His land- 
lady urged quiet upon him and a rest in his bed. 
(rough's nerves were in such a state that he could 
not follow the advice comfortably. An unrest 
drove him from spot to spot. It sent him out of 
the house, and while a wanderer in the street he 
heard the station-bell whose ringing warned 
travelers of the leaving of the train for Boston. 
Gough had no reason for taking this train. He 
only had the strange impulse of unrest, and in his 
uneasiness he took that train. It rumbled off 
toward Boston and took Gough with it. Alas ! 
it was a ride in the wrong direction. 



A Fallen Kxight. 125 



CHAPTER XIV. 

A FALLEN KNIGHT. 

¥HEN Gough reached Boston he knew not 
what to do, but purposelessly sauntered 
through the streets. He thought finally of the 
theater and went to it. There he met some old 
associates. Ah, one's old associates — how much 
good or harm they may do if turning up some 
unexpected day ! Gough's friends observed that 
he did not act naturally. He could only say that 
he had a strange restlessness, that he was very 
sick. They took him to a strange doctor, -the 
keeper of an oyster-room, where Gough's com- 
panions not only offered him oysters as medi- 
cines, but somebody tendered liquor. Heedlessly 
Gough took it. "When he had drunk it, the ugly 
conviction visited him that he had broken his 
pledge. If a pit ever opened before a poor fellow, 
it yawned then before Gough. Here he had 
been fighting liquor for five months, gloriously 
conquering his old enemy, and in an unguarded 
moment he had soiled the cross upon his breast. 



126 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Did the person who pressed Gough to take that 
glass of liquor know what lie was doing? If he 
did, heavy was his burden of responsibility. He 
had the spirit of the fiend who tried in the wil- 
derness to overthrow our Saviour's hopes. 

Gough had thus met with temptation, and 
amid circumstances of peculiar peril. The body 
was weak, he was away from home, he was in 
an oyster-room and a rum-hole, he was with old 
companions. Down before this temptation he 
had gone. One glass opened the gate for the 
entrance of another. He passed the night in 
Boston. He awoke in the morning to a painful 
consciousness of his error in drinking, the night 
before. What could he do ? He left Boston and 
went to his old place of residence in Newbury-' 
port. There the unexpected turns up, as it does 
sometimes very uncomfortably, just when we are 
not looking for it. He was asked to speak at a 
temperance meeting. He was in the depths of 
remorse now. He did speak, however, and went 
to Boston again. There he drank once more, 
lie then determined he would go back to Worces- 
ter. It was such a sorry traveler who returned 
in the rumbling cars ! But go he must. His 
friends were wondering what detained him, but 



A Fallen Knight. 127 

he came at last and frankly told the story of his 
fall. He signed again the pledge, but made up 
his mind to leave Massachusetts, packing his 
effects for such a journey. The friend that 
sticks is the friend for a hard place, (rough's 
supporters proved their sincerity, for they gath- 
ered about him and urged him to stay that he 
might be present at the temperance meeting 
occurring the night of the day appointed, in his 
own mind, for his departure. He attended the 
meeting, spoke, fully acknowledged his fault in 
his fall, and was moved to tears by the kind re- 
ception given him. Gough showed no conceal- 
ment of his mistakes, but frankly avowed them 
in a spirit of true penitence, going to the differ- 
ent towns where he had made engagements and 
acknowledging every thing. A man goes clown 
every time he sins, but he takes one grand step 
up when he is ready to confess his fault and ask 
the forgiveness of others. There is nothing 
unmanly in confession ; the lack of manhood is 
in the sin that makes confession necessary. 

With regard to (rough's fall is there any thing 
about it so very strange ? Look back over his 
struggles to reform, and tell me if one very im- 
portant source of success in all moral improve- 



128 A Knight that Smote the Dragox. 

merit had not been overlooked. Gough had left 
ont God. Where is the story of his surrender to 
God ? Where is it said that through that opened 
door of submission God had come into his soul 
to clean out the old evil, to fill that soul with 
himself, strong, never faltering in effort, victori- 
ous? The only wonder is that Gough held out 
against the enemy as long as he did. In the new 
reformation that followed, Gough sought help 
from God. 

I have already referred to Gough's kind re- 
ception by temperance friends after his fall. It 
is a divine quality to forgive and forgive readily. 
If we keep our friends shivering a long time at 
the door after they have knocked for admission, 
the chill may provoke them to sinning again. 
We must trust people. They may do better and 
they may do worse. We cannot anticipate. 
They will do their best, though, when they feel 
that they have our confidence, and they will go 
into the fight knowing that, though a warm foe 
may be ahead, there are no lukewarm sup- 
porters in the rear. 



Lance in Rest Again. 129 



CHAPTER XV. 

LANCE IN REST AGAIN. 

OUR knight of temperance went out to do 
grand service, lecturing in the smaller places, 
but eventually directing his sharp, brave weap- 
ons against the enemy in the great cities. He 
had a helpmeet to encourage him, and her name 
must not be omitted here. Rev. Dr, Cuyler 
says : 

" Miss Mary Whitcome, the sweet, fair daugh- 
ter of a Boylston farmer, consented to marry 
him during the first year after he signed the 
temperance pledge in Worcester. In the sum- 
mer of 1856 I visited Brother Gough at his 
Boylston home to aid him in revival services 
which he was conducting in his own church, 
then without a pastor. He was supply commit- 
tee, Sunday-school superintendent, pastor, and 
leader of inquiry meetings, all in himself. One 
evening he took me to the house of his neighbor, 
Captain Flagg, and 'said to me : ' Here in this 
house Mary and I did our brief two or three 



130 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

weeks of courting. We did not talk love, but 
only religion and the welfare of my soul. We 
prayed together every time we met, and it was 
such serious business that I did not even kiss her 
until we were married. She took me on trust, 
with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to 
me the best wife God ever made.' " 

Like Mary of old she proved by her life-work 
that deep in her heart was planted the element 
of consecration. 

It is a matter of interest to know just how 
Gough appeared in those early days of his career 
as a great temperance orator. He is of slight 
build, lias flashing eyes set in a sad, thin face, 
and he has a nervous, intense maimer. His voice 
has great range of expression. It can flame 
out in a righteous indignation or soften to those 
inimitable tones of pathos, subduing and melting 
the hearts of his hearers. Does he need the 
help of satire ? His tongue can hiss out a sharp 
invective. Would he make his hearers see any 
of life's humorous sides? He can imitate the 
fuss and fret of the fat old farmer geeing to his 
oxen that lazily pull on the old wood-sled, act the 
marvel-loving sailor spinning a yarn in the fore- 
castle when winds are fair, or the Yankee trader 



Lance in Rest Again. 131 

driving in a rural district a prudent bargain. 
You can see how the life at Sandgate must have 
readied forward and influenced him. He is the 
soldier in a grander army than his veteran father 
ever saw, and going out to meet the grim forces 
of King Alcohol. He is the knight riding out 
of Sandgate Castle with keen lance and sharp 
sword to strike the enemy wherever he may be 
found. It is the chivalrous element revived in 
him, the rising up of a noble, heroic purpose to 
stand as the stronger on the side of the weaker. 
His .young life among the poor enables him to 
reach down with tender, sympathizing hands 
where the lowly are, and then with his inspir- 
iting, noble, hopeful eloquence he can exalt 
them among the rich of the land. And only the 
drunkard knows how Gough, through a later 
experience than boyhood, can come into his 
dreary soul, sit down there in all the emptiness, 
gloom, despair, and say, " Brother, I have been 
in this very place. Let me help you up." 

In the humble volume telling of Gough's 

early years,* I find an account of his appearance 

in Philadelphia as an orator. It is a sketch by 

an English traveler and added to the volume as 

* Autobiography, Boston, 1845. p. 146. 



132 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

an appendix. It is January, and the writer, 
learning that a young man by the name of Gough, 
who has made " quite a sensation," is to speak on 
temperance, resolves to hear him. He finds the 
church in which Gough will speak, and it over- 
flows with an eager audience. He goes on to 
say : " As seven o'clock drew near every eye was 
strained in order to catch the first glimpse of 
him. There was a perfect furor." It is now 
after seven, and the people are uneasy. " Pres- 
ently there is a stir near the door, and a grave- 
looking, spectacled personage, with hair 

" ' half-way 
On the road from grizzle to gray,' 

is seen pushing, with monstrous difficulty, 
through the crowd. . . . ' There he goes ! That's 
Gough, him with the spectacles on!' whispers 
one to another as the grave-looking personage 
ascends the steps " of the pulpit. No, that can 
not be the orator, they conclude, for he is much 
younger. Then " the sexton, stepping forward to 
manage the light, is at first supposed to be Gough. 
Finally the orator himself comes. Every 
body whispers to every body else, ' That's him ; ' 
and this time they are right, for Mr. J. B. 
Gough it is. What, that pale, thin young man 



Lance in Rest Again. 133 

with a brown overcoat buttoned closely np to 
his chin, and looking so attenuated that a toler- 
ably persevering gust of wind would have had 
no difficulty in puffing him to any required 
point of the compass — that he who has swayed 
multitudes by his oratory, made strong men 
weep like little children, and women to sob as 
if their hearts would burst? Yes, look at his 
large, expressive eyes, mark every feature, and 
you see the stamp of no common man there. 
The young apostle of temperance is before us." 
The lecture is described "as the most awfully 
interesting autobiography I ever listened to. 
During that week and the week following Mr. 
Gough lectured to congregated thousands in 
Philadelphia. . . . The excitement was tremen- 
dous. . . . Gallery and pulpit-stairs and aisles 
were thronged with people of every class." 

When Dr. Cuyler made Gough's acquaintance, 
the good minister was a student in the seminary 
at Princeton, and he speaks of Gough as " in the 
early dawn of his splendid fame. His voice had 
a sweetness, a tenderness of pathos, a rich com- 
pass which hard usage well-nigh destroyed long 
ago, and he had already prepared some of his 
most powerful scenic descriptions. Gough was 



134 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

a great dramatic performer, with much of Gar- 
rick's talent for impersonating every variety of 
character. He composed his own dramas, painted 
his own scenery with the tongue, conducted his 
own dialogues, and was a whole ' stock-com- 
pany ' in himself. When he came to Princeton 
and began to mumble over his first apologetic 
sentences before his cultured auditors they all 
pitied him ; but when he told the pathetic story 
of ' Luke ' and his poor bruised wife, and gave 
his thrilling description of the delirium tremens 
all the college professors wept like children. 
The brilliant Professor Dod said to me, 'That 
man equals De Quincey, the opium-eater, in 
pictorial power.' Within five years from that 
time Gough reached the zenith of his fame as 
an orator. In Cincinnati he had to climb by a 
ladder into the window of the packed church 
(following old Dr. Lyman Beecher up the lad- 
der) in order to reach the pulpit. In every city 
his name was enough to attract thousands who 
had never heard a syllable in favor of teetotalism 
before." 

Gough did not make the mistake that has 
trapped some men, cherishing the fancy that he 
could safely hold on to Christ and yet live out- 



Lance in Rest Again. 135 

side the fellowship of Christ's Church. He be- 
came a member of the Congregational Church on 
Ashburton Place, Boston, of which the Rev. Dr. 
E. N. Kirk was pastor. This minister of God was 
one of great warmth of heart, of ready, out- 
reaching sympathy, and his ministrations were a 
strong buttress to (rough's principles. While 
these friends of Gougli are mentioned, and he 
was one to make quickly and long hold his 
friends, it mast not be supposed that he was 
without his enemies. He fell into one trap, and 
I will let Dr. Cuyler in his brief but vivid life- 
sketch of Gough tell the story : 

"It was during the summer of 1845 that Mr. 
Gougli's name suffered its only cloud; but that 
was speedily dispelled. While in a drug-store 
in ]N T ew York he carelessly swallowed a glass of 
soda-water which an enemy had drugged, and 
under the poisonous influence of which he lay 
in a stupid debauch for several days. I never 
shall forget my first interview with him — at the 
house of Mr. George Hurlburt, on Brooklyn 
Heights — after he was discovered in a low haunt 
and rescued. He lifted his head from the pillow 
and gave me the whole pitiable story of his un- 
intentional fall; and his statement was entirely 



138 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 



corroborated by the examining committee from 
Dr. E. N. Kirk's Boston church, to which Mr. 
Gongh belonged. That unhappy episode taught 
him a salutary lesson of caution, and he was 
never ' caught napping' again. But the old 
terrible habit, which was in his system like a 
chained tiger, was only kept in subjection by 
the omnipotent grace of God. He confessed to 
me again and again that the smell of a teaspoon- 
ful of brandy was dangerous to him, and that, 
unless the unseen hand of his Saviour held him 
fast, he would have been in the gutter forty 
years ago." 

The unseen hand ! It is our only hope. 
Scarred with the red Calvary-sign of God's great 
love, let us steadfastly cling to it. 




Going to Hear Gough. 137 



CHAPTER XYI. 

GOING TO HEAR GOUGH. 

¥E are going to hear Gough to-night. 
Whether he speak in church or hall there 
will be a crowd. Notice which way the throng 
in the streets may drift, and follow the drift, 
and you will reach Gough. When he started 
out as a lecturer his receipts were scanty, often 
miserably small, but as he went on, his pock- 
ets grew heavier. He could command large 
audiences, and people would readily pay an 
admission-fee to hear him. While Gough re- 
ceived large sums for lecturing his expenses 
were heavy, and he was also a generous giver. 
Let us go to hear him. Having reached the 
place where Gough speaks, you must hurry to 
the seat you would like to occupy or you will find 
somebody in it unless you have that mortgage- 
claim upon it, " Reserved seat." Look around 
and see the kinds of people in the audience. 
Just before you is a boy, all eyes, save what 
may be ears and mouth, and on the alert to see 



138 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Gough soon as possible, Lear all he can, and 
also gape at liim in wonder. The boy is an 
errand-boy, and before Gough gets through he 
may have a word to say about " chaps 5 ' that run 
errands, and it will surely interest this auditor. 
The man in front of the boy, with a bright, 
sharp look, as if he were a saw and could cut 
through any subject set before him, is a scholar 
of some kind, professor, or college president. 
He likes to hear Gough because somehow Gough 
in his wide experience will take this student of 
books out into the bustling, rushing world. 
May be he has students under liitn who may 
have tripped over the wine-bottle, and he wants 
to know what Gough may have to say about 
such unfortunate stumblers. That man at your 
right is a teamster. He likes to hear Gough be- 
cause Gough acts out his speeches. " I wouldn't 
wonder," he says to himself, "if Gough drove a 
coach-and-four right across the stage, and I want 
to see him handle the ribbins." That man at 
your left is a clergyman. He wants to know 
how to "handle," how to "drive" the temper- 
ance work. He says to himself, " May be I shall 
get, too, from Gough some hint about preaching. 
They say he is very, even wonderfully natural." 



Going to Hear Gough. 139 

And are not those men up in that corner of the 
gallery or balcony, just as it may be church or 
hall, a group of sailors ? Yes, the Sally Ann 
arrived in port this morning, and the seamen 
aboard, finding out that John B. Gough is going 
to lecture, have come rolling up from the wharf. 
" They say he knows how to tell about a storm 
at sea," is their thought, " and we want him to 
spin just one yarn for us." Ah, Jack, you will 
have some plain words said to you about grog- 
drinking, and the storms it can raise, if you stay. 
You will stay, though, and go away feeling that 
you have a baby -heart and woman-eyes. 

And look down toward the door of the 
room. Y x ou will see, I dare say, men with 
shadowed faces, men who know about the power 
of the rum-habit. And all over the audience- 
room you will find people who for one reason or 
another have deepest interest of a very practical 
nature in this subject of temperance. There are 
wives and mothers whose souls are tormented 
with, fear lest those dear to them may have gone 
too deep into that Valley of Shadows which 
might fittingly be termed Death, and yet wdiere 
those who enter are miserably living on. 

But there is Gough, that slender, wiry man, 



140 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

all nerve, all intense feeling, who has suddenly 
come from some place in the rear and now con- 
fronts his audience. He goes to work at once. 
It is very direct work in the case of Gough. He 
gives himself entirely to you. He makes you 
feel that he is personally interested in you, not 
the man away up in Greenland or down in 
Hottentot-land, but you, you before him. Gough 
has a fellow-feeling for every body, loves his 
kind and likes to be with them. Have you 
forgotten when he was a drunkard how his 
social nature took him where people were, out 
among companions that did him no good ? 
Gough has an interest in every body, in any of 
the highest as well as the lowest, in Queen Victo- 
ria and the boy that blacks boots for Queen 
Victoria's children. 

Gough will make you feel that you are one in 
a big family gathered all around him, and that he 
means you as well as your neighbor. He will 
seem to come down from the platform and 
get into the seat before you and there talk 
to you. All this you will appreciate. You will 
also feel that he is thorough, radical, on the 
temperance question. Moderate drinking will 
not answer for Gough, you say. Fittingly may 



Goivg to Hear Gough. 141 

be noticed here the experience of the Congres- 
sional Temperance Society. It was organized 
not to stop drinking, but to limit it. It was 
found, though, that its members when it came 
to practice did not all believe in fences. The 
ninth year of its existence it was planted on that 
safe basis, total abstinence. At a meeting held 
not long after this change, a speaker, addressing 
the chair, declared, " Mr. President, the old 
Congressional Temperance Society has died of 
intemperance, holding the pledge in one hand 
and the champagne-bottle in the other." Our 
present temperance knight could never fight his 
battles that way. He would never try to fight 
a champagne-bottle with a champagne-bottle- 
unless he smashed one against the other. People 
who talk temperance and yet hug the bottle 
will never rid the land of the curse under which 
it groans. Gough, to-night, will not permit his 
hearers to believe they can safely tamper at all 
with the evil of drink. Can they have one 
glass? The man before us on the platform 
knows all about its power. In an address given 
in 1877 at the twelfth anniversary of the Na- 
tional Temperance Society, New York, Mr. 
Gough said : 



142 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

" There are many persons who talk about us 
as being fanatics. They tell us we are rabid on 
this subject of temperance. I ask any reformed 
drunkard in this audience to-night if it is not 
right to be rabid against an evil that has scorched 
and blasted and scathed and scarred us, and we 
shall carry the marks of it to the grave with us. 
Young men sometimes have an idea that a man 
can sow his wild oats and get over it. You put 
your hand in the hand of a giant, and he crushes 
it. He may tear at your hand, and it may be 
healed, and by and by in some sort it may be a 
useful one, but it is a mutilated hand ; its beauty 
and symmetry have gone forever. We who 
have passed through this fire know something 
of its awful scourge ; we know something of the 
terrible struggle to get out of it. I think we 
ought to be what they call rabid." 

It would be very natural if in any temperance 
lecture by Gough he illustrated the strength of 
his appetite for alcoholic beverages. His only 
safety lay in absolute isolation from all that 
would intoxicate. At an anniversary address 
given before the National Temperance Society, 
from which 1 have already quoted, Gough spoke 
about attending a church where the clergyman 



Going to Hear Gough. 143 

gave a very moving discourse. Afterward came 
the administration of the sacrament of the Lord's 
Supper. Gough referred to the wine used at 
the communion. He declared, "The very smell 
of that wine reminded me of days of damning 
degradation, and I would not have touched my 
lips to that wine to save my hand from being 
cut off at the wrist. You well say, ' You are a 
poor, weak man.' There are multitudes like 
me. I was conversing with a man from New 
Hampshire who has done an immense work. 
He has got over thirty thousand men to sign 
the pledge, and he said to me, ' I would not dare 
to put my lips to a drop of wine. Mark me, I 
am not saying that if I took a glass I should go 
on drinking. I am not saying what is or is 
not the strength of my appetite. I say that I 
cannot consistently swallow alcoholic wine, be- 
cause it contains the agency and instrumentality 
that ruined so many.' Do you know what I 
thought when the cup was handed to me? I 
looked at it and said to myself, ' There is enough 
there to ruin me for time and eternitv ' and I 
passed it. I cannot help feeling so upon this 
subject. I know that a great many persons 
would criticise me and say I was all wrong." 



144 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Gough was right. If there are such tempta- 
tions incidental to its use, why should alcoholic 
wine be insisted upon, and especially when the 
non-alcoholic fruit of the vine is every-where 
accessible ? 

But let us turn to the lecturer again and in- 
quire what will be his position when he talks 
about selling liquor. Thorough there, we may 
be assured. What does Gough think of those 
who sell liquor? Shall they be permitted to go 
on peddling death for five or ten cents a glass? 
This is what lie said at the meeting in 1877, 
whose utterances I have already noticed : 

u When I first began, you know, it was in the 
height of the Washingtonian movement. It was 
a grand movement, and many were rescued ; still, 
it did not seem to be all that was desired. At 
any rate, it was as if we were so horrified at the 
sight of men going over the rapids and down 
the awful cataract that we were lining the banks 
with men and building bridges over the rapids, 
and as they came down we picked them up and 
passed them over to friends who bound up their 
wounds. Still the stream of victims came along 
in multitudes. We would pick up some whom 
we picked up six months before as bad and even 



Going to Hear Gough. 145 

worse than they had been. The work of saving 
these men went on gloriously. But by and by 
we began to investigate. We went above the 
rapids and there found men whose sole business 
it was to push them in — to entice them to enter 
upon that smooth, deceitful stream. We came 
to the conclusion that, while we manned our 
forces to save men, we must man other forces to 
stop the murderous business of inducing men to 
drink." 

Yes, " Stop ! " That is what Mr. Gough again 
and again said ; selling must be stopped. Joseph 
Cook has given us John B. Gough's position in 
a fervid eulogy pronounced in Tremont Temple, 
Boston, in February, 1886 : 

"Let us recollect, therefore, that to John 

Gough the center of the temperance army was 

the Church, the right wing the law, the left 

wing moral suasion; or, if you please to say, the 

left wing the law, and the right wing moral 

suasion. He was a broad man ; he meant that 

the whole army should act as a unit ; and he 

found it was none too strong when employed as 

a single weapon against the most terrific political 

and social danger of our time." 

The crowning glorv of Gough's merits as a 
10 



146 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

lecturer was that he so exalted the power of God 
to lift the fallen and save the lost. He could 
heartily echo the opinion of a degraded drunk- 
ard who said, " When I had become almost a 
wreck, both physically and mentally, and friends 
had pronounced my case hopeless, then it was 
that Jesus came to my rescue and I gave him 
my heart. That saved me." Gough believed 
away down to the bottom of his soul that God 
could and would do all that, and people must let 
God do it. Perhaps our lecturer will tell a story 
illustrating this point. His auditors always liked 
to hear him tell a story. I have already said 
that — it would be acted. If he were telling 
about a boy selling newspapers, an old toper go- 
ing up to a bar for his drink, a simpering, silly 
woman turning up her nose in disgust at the 
temperance reformation, then Gough would 
mimic all these acts. While he exalted the 
worth of the Bible and the value of its precepts 
as a help to right-doing, he hated shams, and he 
was the very man to set off in a ridiculous light 
any hypocritical handling of the Scriptures. 
" Whisky is your greatest enemy," said a minis- 
ter to one of his deacons. " But," said the dea- 
con, " don't the Bible say that we are to love 



Going to Hear Gough. 147 

our enemies?" " O, yes, deacon, but it does 
not say that we are to swallow them." If Gongli 
were telling that story on the platform he would 
have acted out that quoter of Scripture in such 
a sarcastic way that it would have been a severe 
rebuke to any such irreverent, false use of God's 
precepts. I find in another lecture before the 
National Temperance Society a story that Gough 
used to show our need of and dependence upon 
the grace of God. Here it is : 

" God is the motive power, and our work is 
simply nothing in comparison with him. Then, 
as we put forth our efforts, let us make our ap- 
peal to him. 

" I remember (and I do not know whether it 
was a legend or not) that a missionary party were 
passing over the prairie when one of them ex- 
claimed, ' See, see that red glare ; what is it ? ' 
They looked and watched, and one old trapper, 
shading his eyes with his hand, cried out, ' The 
prairie is on fire, and it is spreading at the rate 
of twenty miles an hour. It will destroy us, 
and nothing will be left but a few charred bones 
to tell of the party passing over the prairie.' 
' What shall be done? ' The trapper cried, ' We 
must fight fire with fire. Work, work! pull up 



148 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

the grass ; make the circle larger, larger, larger ! 
Quick, quick! I feel the heat upon my brow! 
Quick, for your lives ! pull up the grass, pull up 
the grass ! Now for the matches ! ' 

" They searched and found two. Hastily they 
struck one and it failed, utterly failed. One 
match, and the fire coming in the distance, leap- 
ing with its forked tongues through the dry 
grass at twenty miles an hour ! Only one match ! 
The missionary, baring his brow, said, ' God help 
us ; for thy great name's sake help us in our 
extremity.' Every heart prompted the word, 
and the lips uttered i Amen.' They struck the 
match; it caught fire, and the grass was ignited, 
and, as the fire fenced them in a circle, they 
marched on triumphant, exultant, victorious. 

" Our instrumentalities — national temperance 
societies, bands of hope, sons of temperance, 
good templars, whatever they may be — are as 
feeble as that one match. Before we put forth 
our efforts, then, let us reverently ask God to 
help us for his great name's sake, and we, with 
those we have worked for, shall stand in the 
circle unharmed while the flames play away in 
the distance and we stand saved, not by our 
own efforts alone, but by our own efforts blessed 



Going to Hear Go ugh. 149 

and acknowledged by Him in whose hand are 
the destinies of all men." 

You would have been intensely interested in 
the orator's representation of that prairie-lire in- 
cident. You would have seen the old trapper 
shading his eyes and looking off. You would 
have seen him pulling grass and scratching one 
of those two precious matches. Then you would 
have seen the missionary baring his brow and 
solemnly appealing to God. Again, the scratch- 
ing of a match — their last visible source of help 
— and then you would have witnessed the tri- 
umphant upspringing of flames, while round the 
circle marched the rejoicing survivors. 

Will Gough use the temperance pledge to- 
night? He did give it a very important place 
in his work. In Cincinnati, during a fortnight's 
crusade, 7,640 names were attached to the tem- 
perance pledge. Three hundred of these were 
the autographs of college students. Dr. Cuyler 
said that Gough once showed him several vol- 
umes that had over 150,000 signatures ! A hun- 
dred and fifty thousand ! So many streams 
flowing toward fields blossoming with health, 
purity, happiness ! So many stars hopefully 
shining and lighting up spaces that without 



150 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

temperance were dark indeed ! Some of the 
streams may have ceased to flow and some of 
the stars may have gone out, but how many of 
these influences of hope were continued in useful, 
happy lives. In using the pledge I can readily 
imagine what arguments Gough might press 
home upon his auditors. He might ask them to 
sign for their own sakes, and he might press 
home the motive he himself forcibly felt in all 
his relations to the world — action for another's 
sake. One mounts to the level of noble Chris- 
tian principle when as the stronger he remem- 
bers the weaker and acts so as to advance the 
interests of the weaker. 

Gough worked very hard in his lectures. He 
gave himself to his subject and his hearers. He 
was an electrical battery developing an intense in- 
terest, his points sparkling and flashing as he went 
along. Miss Frances E. Willard says of him : 

"That lithe form was always in motion up 
and down the immense platform ; that sallow, 
bearded face framed in a shock of iron-gray hair 
was of protean aspect, now personating the 
drunkard, then the hypocrite, anon the saint. 
Those restless, eager hands, supple as India Rub- 
ber, were always busy, flinging the hair forward 



Going to Hear Gough. 151 

in one character, back in another, or standing it 
straight up in a third ; crushing the drink iiend, 
pointing to the angel in human nature or doub- 
ling up the long coat-tails in the most grotesque 
climaxes of gesticulation, when, with a ' hop, 
skip, and jump,' he proceeded to bring down 
the house. Dickens says of one of his humorous 
characters that ' his very knees winked ; ' but 
there was a variety and astonishment of expres- 
sion in every movement of Mr. Gough that lit- 
erally beggars description. . . . The marvel is 
that he lived so long, who gave himself so com- 
pletely to his work that at the close of every 
lecture his clothes were literally wringing wet, 
and hours of attention were necessary to soothe 
and recuperate him with food and baths, so that, 
long after midnight, he could sleep. For this 
purpose some friend always went with him, usu- 
ally his wife, that strong, brave, faithful ' Mary,' 
in whose praise he could never say enough." 

Work pays. The lecturer's efforts were sure 
to be rewarded with the intense interest of his 
auditors. While we are still gathered in his 
presence, look about on those who came with us 
to hear "John B. Gough." They are wide- 
awake, for they have heard something that per- 



152 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

sonally interests and steadily holds them. In 
that nimble man on the platform telling about 
some " little chap " on the street, the errand-boy 
has seen himself. The professor has a wide grin 
on his face, for he has gone out into the world 
with the lecturer and has seen many of its follies 
and some of their cures. The teamster has in 
some incident caught the clatter of the hoofs of 
the horses lie wanted to see Gough drive, and 
he has often been beating his palms together in 
hard applause. The minister has learned some- 
thing about temperance work, but he has been 
laughing so intensely at Gough's witty points 
that he has forgotten to study the lecturer's way 
of holding an audience. And those sailors — see ! 
They are up in the gallery still. Their eyes are 
wet as if a heavy sea had been shipped and the 
spray had filled them. The spray came when 
Gough told a touching story about a sailor-boy 
dying at sea, away from home. When the lect- 
ure is over, the applause of the audience is hearty 
and prolonged. 

Gough did not always lecture upon temper- 
ance. He gave some very entertaining addresses 
upon other subjects. It would have been very 
strange if he had not, though, introduced his 



Going to Hear Gougii. 153 

favorite topic, temperance. Major E. T. Scott 
speaks of a lecture by Gough upon " Curi- 
osity/' adding that " lie availed himself of the 
opportunity to ' lug in a bit of temperance,' as 
lie quaintly remarked." It may be a surprise to 
some that this king among lecturers had the 
least uneasiness when he faced an audience, and 
yet he has left on record an account of the nerv- 
ousness that might afflict him when he had a 
speech in anticipation. Public speaking, like all 
other achievements, has its conditions, and one 
who desires success must make up his mind to 
meet those conditions. Does any boy or girl 
read this who " hates " any thing like a declama- 
tion ? Men who have been a success in their 
efforts to reach and arouse the public mind 
have sometimes given a very interesting state- 
ment of their struggles in the direction of ora- 
tory. One of America's greatest speakers was 
Daniel Webster, the son of little but honorable 
New Hampshire. When Webster was fourteen 
years old he went to Phillips Academy, Exeter. 
His biographer, Charles Lanman, says : " Here 
he was first called upon to ' speak in public on 
the stage, 5 and the effort was a failure ; for the 
moment he began he became embarrassed, and 



154: A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

burst into tears. He could repeat psalms to a 
few teamsters at the age of seven, but could not 
address an assembly when twice that age. His 
antipathy to public declamation was insurmount- 
able, and in bearing testimony to this fact he 
once uttered the following words : ' 1 believe I 
made tolerable progress in most branches which 
I attended to wdiile in this school, but there was 
one thing I could not do — 1 could not make a 
declamation. I could not speak before the 
school. . . . Many a piece did I commit to 
memory and recite and rehearse in my own room 
over and over again ; yet when the day came 
when the school collected to hear the declama- 
tion, when my name was called, and I saw all 
eyes turned to my seat, I could not raise myself 
from it ! ' " However, when Daniel Webster laid 
down his life-work as an orator he did not lay 
it down where he took it up, at the ladder's foot, 
but on its topmost round. Between the first 
and the last rounds there was a long interval of 
climbing, of hard work. For the sake of the 
young let me earnestly say that we must not 
close our eyes to the importance of this fact, 
work. A bar of iron that is worth five dollars 
can be turned into horseshoes worth $10.50. 



Going to Heak Gough. 155 

Work longer and harder on that iron bar. Yon 
can separate it into needles that will bring you 
$355. Split it up into the blades of penknives, 
and your labor will bring you $3,295. Make one 
more trial. Instead of these horseshoes, needles, 
or penknives, stretch out the iron into the bal- 
ance-springs of watches. Your five-dollar bar 
will net you $250,000. So much for work, 
work, work. Do not undervalue it. Crown it 
in your regard ; it will crown you with honor. 
Work helped make our temperance knight. 



156 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

ACROSS THE SEAS. 

WE are about to transfer our thoughts to the 
country of which Sandgate by the sea is a 
part. Let us inquire about the temperance ref- 
ormation in England. Conscience there was 
more drowsy than in America. Great Britain's 
conscience was almost smothered under a great 
mass of drink. To-day it is more sleepy than 
that of America. So hard to give a knock at 
the door loud enough to arouse the heavy British 
sleeper, and still there have been notable efforts 
at knocking attended with a measure of success. 
A noble temperance reformer was Father 
Mathew, a priest of the Church of Rome. This 
big-souled man was born in Ireland, October 10, 
1790. He was ordained in 1814. In his first 
sermon he spoke of the Bible assertion that it 
is more difficult for a rich man to enter the 
kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass 
through the eye of a needle. He said it was the 
use of riches, not their possession, that might be 



Across the Seas. 15 7 

harmful. A fat old man, rich, too, said to the 
young preacher afterward, " Father Mathew, I 
feel very much obliged to you for trying to 
squeeze me through the eye of a needle." Fa- 
ther Mathew in his ministry was quickly known 
as a generous, self-sacrificing, loving man. One 
of his mottoes was, " A pint of oil is better than 
a hogshead of vinegar." He was full of good 
works. Incessant in labor, he loved to say, 
" Take time by the forelock, for he is bald be- 
hind." A warm-hearted Quaker, William Mar- 
tin, was anxious to see the temperance cause 
pushed, and the thought in his heart w r as, " Fa- 
ther Mathew is the man to push this work." 
Martin and Mathew, two good historical names, 
were associated together in the oversight of the 
Cork work-house. Martin, witnessing some dis- 
tressing case, whose occasion was rum, would 
say to his associate, " O, Theobald Mathew, if 
thou wouldst only give thy aid, much good 
could be done in the city." 

What the Quaker said stirred the conscience 
of the Roman Catholic. Seeking God's guidance, 
Father Mathew resolved to join and press the 
work of total abstinence. What would he do 
next? Hark! There is a knock at William 



158 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Martin's door, one April morning, in the good 
year 1838. When the summons was answered 
who should be wanted but the Quaker himself 
by this Roman Catholic priest ? Sometimes 
when an}' thing special is about to happen, our 
minds are strongly impressed that way, and the 
Quaker had an idea that Father Mathew might 
have temperance on his mind. Off the anxious 
Quaker started. The priest met the Quaker at 
the door and said cordially, ""Welcome, Mr. 
Martin ! Welcome, my dear friend ! It is very 
kind of you to come to me at so short a notice, 
and so punctually too." 

"I was right glad to come to thee, Father 
Mathew, for I expected that thou hadst good 
news for me." 

"Well, Mr. Martin, I have sent for you to 
assist me in forming a temperance society in 
this neighborhood." 

" I know it ! Something seemed to tell me 
that thou wouldst do it at last." 

The time for the meeting was selected, and 
William Martin left, saying, " O, Father Ma- 
thew ! Thou hast made me a happy man this 
night." 

What a good thing just a push may be ! 



Across the Seas. 159 

Behind it, though, was a persistent hand, and 
above the hand were the heart and brain of a 
big man. People ridiculed the priest, but the 
meeting was called, and under the pledge was a 
name at whose signature, its owner said, " Here 
goes, in the name of God, Theobald Mat hew, 
C. C, Cove Street, No. 1." Sixty additional 
signatures were given. Some of God's plant- 
ings grow very rapidly, and this movement 
proved to be a quick-growing, overshadowing 
tree of blessing. How fast it did put forth 
branches and spread out its leaves ! In three 
months there were twenty-five thousand pledge- 
signers ; in five months, one hundred and thirty- 
one thousand ; in about nine months one hundred 
and fifty-six thousand. 

When the year 1839 opened its doors there 
were two hundred thousand signatures to the 
pledge. Observe now its character : " I prom- 
ise, with the Divine assistance, as long as I shall 
continue a member of the Teetotal Temperance 
Society, to abstain from all intoxicating drinks, 
except for medicine or sacramental purposes, 
and to prevent as much as possible, by advice 
and example, drunkenness in others." That 
clause, " as long as I shall continue a member of 



160 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

tlie Teetotal Temperance Society," is not as sat- 
isfactory as the simple, absolute promise to ab- 
stain — always. This second form of promise is 
a road long enough to reach across life, which is 
the thing desired. Better journey in Father 
Mathew's shorter road than not to travel at all. 
A vast host made this journey. The work spread. 
The movement was too big to be corked up in 
Father Mathew's city and its neighborhood. 
The great reformer went to Limerick, and there, 
in the course of four days, one hundred and 
fifty thousand signed his pledge. Waterford 
only needed three days to add eighty thousand 
to the list. Maynooth made a contribution of 
thirty-five thousand, varying the usual quality 
of signatures with those of eight professors and 
two hundred and fifty students. In two days 
Galway furnished a hundred thousand names. 
" The form of the engagement partook of the 
religious," it is said. A medal was given, and the 
signer greatly revered the little memorial. In 
some minds the idea gained ground that this 
" Apostle of Temperance " enjoyed Heaven's 
smile, and that he was miraculously aided. Ire- 
land's habits were so much affected that many 
brew r eries and distilleries were closed. Spiders 



Across the Seas. 161 

were the busiest creatures in those dingy build- 
ings. It was a happy state of things. A wealthy 
distiller once asked Father Mathew how he 
could ruin the business of so many people. So 
Father Mathew told him this story : " A fat 
duck who had filled her crop with worms was 
met by a fox. Sir Reynard was going to make 
a meal of the duck, when she asked him how he 
could take the life of a harmless duck just to 
satisfy hunger. ' Out upon you, madam ! ' said 
the fox. ' With all your fine feathers you are a 
pretty tiling to lecture me about taking life to 
satisfy hunger. Is not your crop now full of 
worms ? You destroy more lives in one day to 
satisfy your hunger than I do in a whole month.' " 
Was not that a good answer to a distiller with 
his stuffed crop, stuffed with the money of poor 
people ? With this decrease in liquor-drinking 
went a decrease of crime. 

Father Mathew's work could not be confined 
to Ireland. He went to England in 1843. Here 
six hundred thousand entered into covenant with 
him to let rum alone. In 1849 he came to the 
United States. Remaining two years in this 
glorious work, though death was trying to stop 

him with its attacks of paralysis, he visited 
11 



162 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

twenty-five States, and in three hundred cities ad- 
ministered the pledge. One day this work appar- 
ently was all over. He who had been able to say, 
" I am the strongest man in Ireland," lay in the 
silence and stillness and helplessness of death ; but 
what a work he had wrought ! What an influ- 
ence he left behind to work on for him ! No, 
death could not stop his influence. In the next 
life his glorious energy was continued in other 
forms of blessed activity. 

Crossing the Atlantic, we visited Ireland 
first. Now let us go farther and notice En- 
gland, and then we will look over the border 
into Scotland. I give only one name now, the 
most prominent in England's pioneer temper- 
ance movement, Joseph Livesey, born March 5, 
1794, in the neighborhood of Preston. He was 
a poor boy, a weaver, ambitious to know some- 
thing. He would read and weave at the same 
time. " For hours I have done this," he says, 
" and without making bad work. The book was 
laid on the breast-beam, with a cord slipped on 
to keep the leaves from rising, head, hands, and 
feet all busy at the same time. I had a restless 
mind, panting for knowledge and incapable of 
inaction. That part of the loom and the wall 



Across the Seas. 163 

nearest my seat was covered with marks which 
I had made to assist me to remember certain 
facts, and these hieroglyphics were there when 
I left." It was a cellar whose humble wall wit- 
nessed such pathetic efforts to obtain knowledge. 
" At night," he says, " I was allowed no candle, 
and for hours I have read by the glare of the 
few embers left in the fire-grate, with my head 
close to the bars." One sad feature of his sur- 
roundings was that of drunkenness. This is 
what he said of the church : " We had a sad lot 
connected with the church. The grave-digger 
and his father were both drunkards. The ring- 
ers and singers were all hard drinkers, and I re- 
member the singers singing in my father's kitch- 
en on a Christmas morning in a most disgraceful 
condition. The parish clerk was no exception. 
"When the clock-hands were motionless in the 
morning for want of winding, as was often the 
case, the remark was, ' The clerk was drunk 
again last night.' " 

Those distant days were dark indeed. Jo- 
seph, fortunately, rose above his surroundings. 
Aptness and study will carry one ahead. In 
1831 he took his last glass. He says : ik It was 
only one glass of whisky and water. I often 



164 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

say it was the best I ever drank — the best be- 
cause it was the last — and if I remain in my 
senses I shall never take another. I did not 
then understand the properties of alcoholic liq- 
uors, though I ought to have done, being thirty- 
seven years of age." That one glass, to use his 
own words, " took hold of me. I felt very 
queer as I went home, and retired to bed unwell. 
Next morning my mind was made up, and I 
solemnly vowed that I would never take any in- 
toxicating liquors again — a vow which I have re- 
ligiously kept to the present time. I had a large 
family of boys, and this resolution was come to, 
I believe, more on their account than from any 
knowledge I had of the injurious properties of 
the liquors." One good step leads to another. 
Get the muscles into position for climbing up 
one step and they will be very likely to climb 
another. As adults had no opportunity for Sun- 
day-school instruction, Livesey's benevolent, en- 
ergetic nature made room for that opportunity, 
and, New Year's day, 1832, in his adult school 
he advised the young men to start a temperance 
organization. This was a one-legged affair, as it 
permitted the moderate use of malt liquors; 
spirits must be abstained from. In other words, 



Across the Seas. 165 

I should say it allowed a man to play with a lit- 
tle powder but not with dynamite. This little- 
powder business did not work. One day Livesey 
saw one "John King," of whom he said, "I 
asked him if he would sign a pledge of total ab- 
stinence ; to which he consented. I then went 
to the desk and wrote one out. He came up to 
the desk and I said, ' Thee sign first.' He did 
so, and I signed it after him." It is claimed 
that from this fountain-head ran the good, clean, 
healthy current of the total abstinence move- 
ment in England. 

There was an old cock-pit in the neighborhood. 
Its name tells its character. There was room in 
this chivalrous institution for the brutalizing of 
seven hundred people, but one September day 
the cock-pit was used for a refining purpose. 
There was no cock-fighting at this meeting, but, 
after a healthy strife over the question of mod- 
eration or total abstinence, seven men signed 
this pledge : " We agree to abstain from all liq- 
uors of an intoxicating quality, whether ale, por- 
ter, wine, or ardent spirits, except as medicines." 
This bridge went away over the waters of diffi- 
culty, and did not leave any body floundering in 
temptation when half across. We may have 



166 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

wondered where the word " teetotal " took its 
rise. It was at a meeting held about this time 
that the word was originated, its first letter being 
repeated in the pronunciation. A man who 
took such a pledge was not only " total V in his 
adhesion to the cause, but " t — total." One 
Richard Turner is said to have originated this 
popular term. On his grave-stone you will find 
these words : " Beneath this stone are deposited 
the remains of Richard Turner, author of the 
word ' teetotal ' as applied to abstinence from all 
intoxicating liquors, w r ho departed this life on 
the 27th day of October, 1846, aged fifty-six 
years." Richard Turner's little flag has led 
many to victory. Joseph Livesey believed in the 
printing-press, and he used it in various ways, 
publishing the Preston Guardian and scatter- 
ing temperance documents thick as the leaves 
that the autumn-winds rattle down from the 
trees. He wrote, he lectured, he — lived. He 
died in 1884, but lives on, his memory a beacon- 
light to many imperiled souls on life's sea. 

Up in Scotland a good work was wrought for 
temperance by Dr. Thomas Guthrie, good 
Thomas Guthrie, whose face has such a sharp, 
shrewd, human look — a face that dogs would 



Across the Seas. 167 

run toward, recognizing a friend, but a face that 
rogues would run from, knowing a quick-witted 
enemy was there. This Presbyterian clergy- 
man was born in 1803. In 1837 he went to 
Edinburgh, there laboring for his Master. He 
saw down into the depths of the poverty that, 
shivering in winter and hungry always, is massed 
in the great cities. He w r as an eloquent pleader 
for ragged schools and total abstinence. Among 
other things influencing him to abstain from 
liquor was a half-ragged carman's answer when 
Dr. Guthrie was traveling in Ireland. This car- 
man, in wet, chilly, sticky weather, was offered 
a glass of toddy. He refused. u I am an ab- 
stainer and will take no toddy," said the carman. 
" Well, that stuck in my throat," said Dr. Guth- 
rie, " and it went to my heart and (though in 
another sense than drink) to my head. That 
and other circumstances made me a teetotaler." 
What a picture this is which he paints in dark 
colors in his book, The City : its Sins and Sor- 
rows. Dr. Guthrie says : " Look at the case of 
a boy whom I saw lately. He was but twelve 
years of age and had been seven times in jail. 
The term of his imprisonment was run out, and 
so he had doffed his prison garb and resumed 



108 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

his own. It was the depth of winter, and, hav- 
ing neither shoes nor stockings, his red, naked 
feet were upon the frozen ground. Had you 
seen him shivering in his scanty dress, the mis- 
ery pictured in an otherwise comely face, the 
tears that dropped over his cheeks as the child 
told his pitiful story, you would have forgotten 
that he was a thief, and only seen before you an 
unhappy creature more worthy of a kind word, a 
loving look, a helping hand than the guardian- 
ship of a turnkey and the dreary solitude of a 
jail. His mother was in the grave, his father 
had married another woman. They both were 
drunkards. Their den, which is in the High 
Street — I know the place — contained one bed, 
reserved for the father, his wife, and one child. 
No couch was kindly spread for this poor child 
and his brother — a mother's son then also im- 
mured in jail. When they were fortunate enough 
to be allowed to be at home, their only bed was 
the hard, bare floor. I say fortunate enough, be- 
cause on many a winter night their own father 
hounded them out. Ruffian that be was, he 
drove his infants weeping from the door to break 
their young hearts and bewail their cruel lot on 
the corner of some filthy stair, and sleep away 



Across the Seas. 



1G9 



the cold, dark hours as best they could, crouching 
together for warmth like two houseless do°;s." 

Is it any wonder that Dr. Guthrie lifted his 
voice and cried for total abstinence ? Thank 
God, there were echoes to his cry. Other men 
cried with him, and Scotland heard a chorus in 
response. 




170 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

AN ATTACK ON ENGLAND'S DRAGON. 

IT is now 1853. Let us imagine ourselves 
over in England, packed with many, many 
others into Exeter Hall. It is a big audience. 
They were so eager to see somebody and hear 
something that people waited four hours for the 
opening of the doors. It is an English audience, 
solid, hearty, made up of people from varied 
walks in life. By the side of Tom the plow- 
boy, I can see Smith the grocer, and the " squire " 
has come from his old-time manor to sit by the 
side of his village parson. It is a big audience 
gathered under the auspices of the London 
Temperance League. It is a smiling, eager, ex- 
pectant crowd. I seem to hear the whispered 
inquiries, " Has he come ? " " Is he on the plat- 
form ? " " Where is he ? " Who is this. " he ? " 
What does it mean ? Why, Britain, awakened 
on the subject of temperance, enjoying the 
fruits of the labors of men like Father Mathew, 
Joseph Livesey, Dr. Guthrie, and others, has 



An Attack on England's Dragon. 171 

sent over to America for help in attacking anew 
that ugly dragon, Drink, still ravaging among 
them. An American crusader has been invited 
and has promised to come. This strong, gallant 
knight may be expected any moment to step 
upon the platform, and then what a hospitable, 
welcoming tumult there will be in Exeter Hall ! 
But who shall it be ? What great, strong, 
stalwart, giant American shall come? Ah, 
there is America's knight on the platform ! 
What, that slender man before the great congre- 
gation ? Who is it ? Hold ! Do you not recog- 
nize him ? Do you not recall the little fellow 
from Sandgate on board the packet, the boy 
with swollen eyes and thumping heart, crying 
in his homesickness ? Do you not remember 
the young fellow singing comic songs at the 
theater, singing in the midst of a drunkard's 
wretchedness? Can you not see the young 
book-binder going down into the depths of 
drunkenness at Newburyport? Can you not 
call back out of the past the poor inebriate that 
Joel Stratton tapped on the shoulder, and then 
that temperance knight set apart to his work in 
such humble gatherings as that in the little school- 
house on the plain, soon falling before his old 



172 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

enemy, yet rising again and going out now in 
God's strength to do battle every-where in a 
glorious cause ? Yes, it is Gough who has come 
over the seas, and just as St. George gave the 
dragon such a worsting, so our knight in God's 
name will ride hard on that old beast, Drink. 
There he is on the platform, still young, only 
thirty-six, the same wide-awake, magnetic Gough. 
Not a very big knight ! Will lie ride down the 
dragon ? The people are applauding, determined 
to cheer their idea, whether their ideal may have 
arrived or not. And Gough — he is trying to 
face composedly this immense sea of enthusiasm 
whose waves are running so high. Will he meet 
their expectation ? 

The same oratory, though, that had faced tri- 
umphantly great, critical audiences in America is 
successful in England. Now Gough bears his 
auditors away in some magnificent apostrophe to 
temperance, or he leads them captive and in 
tears as he descends into the pitiful depths of 
shame and misery opened by intemperance, and 
tells all to look about them. This moment they 
are laughing at some droll mimicry ; the next 
they flame with him into a burning indignation 
at the cruelty of the dragon, Drink. Ah, it is 



Ax Attack on England's Dragon. 173 

the same Gough in Exeter Hall, London, as in 
Tremont Temple, Boston, with the same rare 
voice and the same rare powers behind it, lead- 
ing many aroused souls after him as he rides 
against the dragon. For this knight from Amer- 
ica, Exeter Hall has only enthusiastic admira- 
tion. 

Gough's platform career in England was one 
extended triumph. He was absent in England 
two years, pleading continually for his beloved 
cause. In 1857 he went again to fight that 
old enemy, Intemperance, on British shores. 
In 1878 he once more crossed the waters, and 
when he disembarked at Liverpool what a very 
complimentary document was handed him ! It 
was a roll of teetotalers one hundred thousand 
strong ! He noticed a decided change of opinion 
upon the subject of temperance. At a Gough 
memorial service in Worcester, in 1886, Judge 
Aldrich is reported as saying of Gough that "in 
1878, when about to go to England for the last 
time,he was given a Godspeed in Mechanics' Hall, 
and he then stated that when he went to En- 
gland twenty-five years before not a clergyman 
of note could be found to preside at his meetings. 
When he went in 1878, bishops, clergymen, digni- 



174 A KNIGHT THAT SMOTE THE D&AG0N. 

taries, high officials, and even the prime minister 
vied with each other to do him honor." 

Did the once poor boy from Sandgate forget his 
old home ? He remembered it, and went there, 
speaking to the villagers on his thirty-seventh 
birthday, and the old scenes were revived. He 
searched out the motherly old woman who com- 
forted him with milk and ginger-bread when 
starting on his journey from home, and he made 
her a handsome gift, calling it a payment, and 
afterward at Christmas-time he sent her each 
year fifty dollars. Gough had a long, grateful 
memory, and here is the place to say that soon 
after a return to America his old friend, Joel 
Stratton, died, and Gough each year gave Mrs. 
Stratton three hundred dollars. 

Knowing Gouglrs energy, the intense sym- 
pathy of his nature with every good cause that he 
represented, w T e know that those English trips 
must have been the occasion of abundant labors. 
I find in some of Gough's own statements a 
glass through which we can look afar and see 
this busy knight riding hard and riding ever. 
Here is a work on Drinking Usages of Society * 
I open it and I see a lecture pronounced by 

* Published by Massachusetts Temperance Society, 1861. 



An Attack on England's Dragon. 175 

Gongh at a reception given him in Tremont Tem- 
ple, Boston. I am about to give an extract. It 
is a glass that shows our knight on the Glasgow 
field where the forces of intemperance are massed 
in strong, deep lines. 

At that reception, September 17, 1860, this 
was said : " Last November, I had spoken in the 
City Hall of Glasgow to twenty-five hundred peo- 
ple. I was staying at the house of one of the 
merchant princes of that city, and when we came 
down-stairs his carriage w T as at the door — silver- 
mounted harness, coachman in livery, footman 
in plain clothes. You know it is seldom teetotal 
lecturers ride in such style, and it is proper, there- 
fore, that we should speak of it when it does 
happen, for the good of the cause. As we came 
down, the gentleman said to me, ' It is so drizzly 
and cold you had better get into the carriage and 
wait until the ladies come down. 5 I think I 
never had so many persons to shake hands with 
me. ' God bless you, Mr. Gough ! ' said one. 
' You saved my father ! ' ' God bless you ! ' said 
another. ' You saved my brother ! ' Said a third, 
' God bless you ! I owe every thing I have in 
the world to you ! ' My hands absolutely ached 
as they grasped them one after another. Finally, 



176 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

a poor, wretched creature came to the door of 
the carriage. I saw his bare shoulder and naked 
feet ; his hair seemed grayer than mine. He 
came up, and said, ' Will you shake hands with 
me?' I put my hand into hjs hot, burning 
palm, and he said, 'Don't you know me?' 
' Why,' said I, ' isn't your name Aiken ? ' ' Yes.' 
' Harry Aiken ? ' ' Yes.' ' You worked with 
me in the book-binder's shop of Andrew Hutch- 
inson, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1842, didn't 
you ? ' ' Yes.' ' What is the matter with you ? ' 
' I am desperately poor.' I said, i God pity you ; 
you look like it ! ' I gave him something, and 
obtained the services of Mr. Marr, the secretary 
of the Scottish League, to find out about him. 
He picks up rags and bones in the streets of 
Glasgow, and resides in a kennel in one of the 
foulest streets of that city. When the ladies 
came to the carriage and got in, I said, ( Stop, 
don't shut that door ! Look there at that half- 
starved, ragged, miserable wretch, shivering in 
the cold and in the dim gaslight ! Look at 
him ! ' The ring of that audience was in my 
ears, my hands aching with the grasp of friend- 
ship from scores, my surroundings bright, my 
prospects pleasant, and I said, ' Ladies, look 



Ax Attack on England's Dragon. 177 

there! There am 7, hut for the temperance 
movement ! That man worked with me, roomed 
with me, slept with me, was a better workman 
than I, his prospects brighter than mine. A 
kind hand was laid on my shoulder, in Worces- 
ter Street, in 1842 ; it was the turning-point in 
my history. He went on. Seventeen years 
have passed, and we meet again, with a gulf as 
deep as hell between us ! ' I am a trophy of 
this movement, and I thank God for it." 
Hear Gough again in the same lecture : 
" A man came to me at Covent Garden, sum- 
mer before last, and said, ' Mr. Gough, I want 
you to come into -my place of business. ' I re- 
plied, ' I am in a little hurry now. 5 ' You must 
come into my place of business!' So, when he 
got me there — into a large fruit-stall, where he 
was doing business to the amount of two hun- 
dred and fifty or three hundred pounds (a thou- 
sand or twelve hundred and fifty dollars) a 
week — he caught hold of my hand, and said, 
' God bless you, sir ! ' ' What for? Have I ever 
seen you before V ' I heard you, sir,' he said, ' in 
Exeter Hall, in 1853; I was a brute.' 'No, you 
were not.' ' Well, I was worse.' 'No, you were 

not.' ' Well, I was as bad as ever I could be.' 
12 



178 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

Then he told me some sad things, and went 
on: 'God bless you, sir! See what a business 
I am doing ! Look here ! See that woman in 
the corner ; it is my wife. La ! how I have 
knocked her about ! Would you go and shake 
hands with her?' 

" ' I have no objection.' 

" ' Do, sir.' 

" I went up to her and offered my hand. She 
held back, and said, ' My fingers are so sticky 
with the fruit, sir ! ' 

"'La!' said the husband. 'Mr. Gough, you 
don't mind a little sticky finger?' 

u ' No, sir ; ' and I shook hands with her. 

" Our fingers stuck together ! They were 
more sticky than I had expected. Again the 
man said to me, i God bless you, sir ! I wish 
I could give you something. Do you like 
oranges ? ' 

" ' Sometimes.' 

" He went to a shelf that was full of them, 
and began to fill a great bag with them. 

" ' That's enough, sir ;' but he paid no attention 
to me, but filled the bag and put it in my arms. 

" ' Go along with you ! ' said he. ' Don't say 
a word ; go along with you ! God bless you ! ' 



An Attack on England's Dragon. 179 

" I had positively to hire a cab to enable me 
to get home ! 

" The day before Christinas I took an Amer- 
ican lady — who is in this house to-night — to see 
this man, saying, ' I am going to call on a gen- 
tleman whom I want you to see.' 

" I had spoken on the preceding Monday 
evening in Exeter Hall for the eighty-first time, 
and you know when a man speaks eighty-one 
times in one place on the same subject he gets 
pretty well pushed for matter; so I told this 
story there. The first thing he said, when I 
entered his place of business, was, ' O, you did 
give somebody a terrible rub last Monday ; 
didn't you?' 'You didn't mind it?' 'Mind 
it ? No ; I liked it. The man next to me 
kept a-nudging me and saying, " That means 
you." But, Mr. Gough, just look at that cellar ! ' 
i I see the cellar.' ' I want to show you this 
letter. I have a letter from Manchester or- 
dering me to send them five hundred pounds 
of fruit. Now, do you suppose any body 
would have ordered that of such a fellow as I 
used to be? Look at that cellar! I spent a 
whole Sunday in that cellar on a heap of rotten 
vegetables, with a rope to hang myself by ! 



180 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

I heard the bells chime for church and knew 
when they were singing and when they were 
praying and when they were preaching. They 
little thought a poor wretch was down here 
fighting, for it was a steady fight all that day 
between that rope and me and my conscience. 
Now, sir, I lease that cellar and clear a hun- 
dred pounds a year. Here come my children, 
just from boarding-school — four of 'em. Shake 
hands with 'em, O, how I wish you lived 
where I do ! ' " 

These incidents give just a hint of Gough's 
usefulness in connection with his labors in 
Great Britain. Told in his unique way, his 
flexible voice adapting itself to every turn of 
feeling, his face, his form, the whole Gough 
thrown into the expression of every character 
introduced, and you can imagine the effect on 
any audience. And to show the deep resources 
of the man, his great bulk of power in reserve, 
think of him speaking in one place for the 
eighty-first time! Gough made this state- 
ment in 1860. He was in Great Britain after 
this, and doubtless spoke again in Exeter Hall. 
Mr. Cook says that Gough spoke in that grand, 
historic place ninety nights in succession. 



An Attack on England's Dragon. 181 

I thought I had finished, yet I am tempted to 
give one more extract from that same lecture. 
This incident specially shows what a hand-to- 
hand fight our temperance knight carried on 
with the dragon, Drink. Says Gough : " I spoke 
in Dundee to the outcasts of that town. ... It 
was a horrid sight to look at — rags, filth, 
nakedness — a festering, steaming mass of putre- 
fying humanity. A woman sat at my feet, and 
the place was so crowded that I touched her. 
Her nickname for years had been ' Hell-fire.' 
The boys called her 'Fire.' . . . Fifty-three times 
had she been convicted, and sentenced for from 
six days to four months' imprisonment." 

To shorten the lecturer's account, " Fire" was 
a dreadful woman, a blasphemer, a fighter, a 
drunkard. He pictured vividly what drink 
will do. 

Some of his auditors " lifted up their naked 
arms and said, ' O, that is all true.' By and by 
the woman at my feet looked up and said, 
'Where did you learn all that?' Then she 
looked as if she had some important communi- 
cation to make to the people, and she said, ' The 
man kens all about it. Would you give the 
likes o' me the pledge ? ' 



182 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

" ' To be sure I will,' said I. 

" ' O, no, no ! ' said some. ' It won't do for her 
to take the pledge.' 

" I said, < Why not? 5 

" ' She can't keep it.' 

" 6 How do you know ? ' 

" ' She will be drunk before she goes to bed 
to-night.' 

"'How do you know? Madam,' I said to 
her, 'here is a gentleman who says you cannot 
keep the pledge if you sign it.' 

" The woman flew into a rage. Said I, ' Be- 
fore you fight about it, tell me can you keep it ? ' 

u The reply was, ^ If I say I will, I can.' 

" I said, ' Then you say you will ? ' 

"<I will.' 

"* Give me your hand.' 

" ' I will.' 

" ' Then,' said I, ' put down your name.' 

" After she had done it, I said, ' Give me your 
hand again.' 

" She did so, and said, ' I will keep it.' 

"'I know you will,' I said, ' and I shall come 
back again to see you.' 

u ' Come back when you will,' said she, ' and 
you will find I have kept it.' " 



An Attack on England's Dragon. 183 

Some three years after, Gough went back, 
and the woman had kept her pledge, no longer 
" Fire," but " Mrs. Archer, a very respectable 
Scotchwoman." She said to him, " I am a poor 
body — I dinna ken much, and what little I did 
ken has been about knocked out of me by the 
staves of the policemen. They pounded me 
over the head, sir — I dinna ken how to pray — I 
never went to God's house these twenty-eight 
years. I cannot pray, but sometimes I dream," 
and then her eyes filled — " I dream I am drunk, 
and I cannot pray ; but I get out of my bed, sir, 
and I kneel by the side of it, and I never get 
back to it until day-dawn, and all I can say is, 
4 God keep me ! I canna get drunk any more.' " 
Gough affirmed, " That woman is now to be seen 
going every day to hear God's word preached." 

That was a beautiful forget-me-not, a fra- 
grant souvenir of Gough's activity. Let me 
pluck another fair flower of remembrance. 

Dr. William M. Taylor was at a temperance 
meeting in England when Mr. Gough was mak- 
ing his third trip to that country. Dr. Taylor 
said that after the meeting forty or fifty persons 
came forward and blessed Gough because twenty 
years before he had saved them from intemper- 



184 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

ance. I can see them eagerly reaching out their 
hands. They were not hands pitifully extended 
for help, thrust up out of the depths of shame 
and sin and weakness, but hands reached down 
from heights of grateful triumph and joy, to 
which they had been raised by this rescuer from 
the abysm of intemperance. 




Sunset-time. 185 



CHAPTER XIX. 

SUNSET-TIME. 

THE hours through the day may seem to be 
long, but the trailing shadows of the sunset 
will fall at last. After the sowing of the spring, 
month after month must roll by, but the au- 
tumn-time will surely come. The yellow grain 
will be reaped. The harvester will homeward 
go. That young Sandgate pilgrim, whom we 
watched as he crossed the seas and began life 
here, was an old man at last. The time of the 
sunset was at hand. The harvest-field of this life 
must soon be left behind. And yet, though an 
old man, John B. Gough did not relinquish that 
sphere of effort in which he had been so success- 
ful, the platform. His lectures on various sub- 
jects still magnetized the people. When Gough 
spoke, large audiences gathered. He had a list 
of lectures on popular subjects. Such themes 
as " Peculiar People," " Fact and Fiction," 
"Habit," "Curiosity," "Circumstances," were 
the garb in which he arrayed some of his 



186 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

thoughts and then marched upon the platform 
these pilgrims of the hour. When he touched 
on temperance, his soul kindled like tinder meet- 
ing a spark. He had his seasons of rest in his 
home at Hillside, in Boylston, Massachusetts, 
six miles from Worcester. Its surroundings 
were picturesque. Within was a tasteful Re- 
treat where were clustered various mementoes 
of his eventful life. He had an excellent library, 
and it gave him an opportunity to recall his old 
craft and clothe anew in finer dress many of his 
volumes. 

There was such a contrast between the want, 
the struggle, the fight of his early days, and the 
affluence, ease, and victory of his old age. His 
lectures were exceedingly remunerative. He 
was enabled thereby to give generously and live 
in comfort. His last days still found him at 
work, a reaper in life's great harvest-field. John 
B. Gough did not own a rusty sickle. 

The end came at Philadelphia, in the sixty- 
ninth year of his age. He was addressing an 
audience and had uttered the characteristic 
words, " Young man, keep your record clean ! " 
It was his final appeal. In the far-away Sand- 
gate days, he received a blow on the head from 



Sunset-time. 187 

a spade. The blow seemed to be repeated in 
the darting pains sometimes afflicting him in 
after years, and he would raise his hand to his 
head to soothe it. At Philadelphia the hand 
was going up to stay the pain, when it helpless- 
ly fell. He too dropped. It was not, though, 
the blow from a hostile force. It was only the 
hand of Providence checking him in his earthly 
course and turning him aside to one still better. 
He was stricken Monday, February 15, 1886. 
He died the following Thursday. To the funeral 
at Hillside many loving hearts hastened and 
there gathered in a tearful hush around the hon- 
ored remains. One very touching memento 
hung across a chair near the coffin in the Hill- 
side library. It was a little handkerchief brought 
to Mrs. Gough by a woman who washed the tem- 
perance advocate to have some pledge of her 
gratitude. Said this woman : 

"I am very poor ; I would give him a thou- 
sand pounds if I had it, but I brought this. I 
married with the fairest prospects before me, 
but my husband took to drinking, and every 
thing went. Every thing was sold, until, at last, 
I found myself in a miserable room. My hus- 
band lay drunk in the corner, and my sick child 



188 A Knight that Smote the Dragon. 

lay moaning on my knee. I wet this handker- 
chief through with my tears. My husband met 
yours. He spoke a few words and gave a grasp 
of the hand, and now for six years my husband 
has been all to me that a husband can be to a 
wife. I have brought your husband the very 
handkerchief I wet through that night with my 
tears, and I want him to remember that he lias 
wiped away those tears from me, I trust in God, 
forever." 

Gough had said of this handkerchief, "You 
do not think it worth three cents, but you have 
not money enough to buy it from me." 

The funeral services were without ostentation, 
but they were \ery sincere, and hearts far and 
near were in sympathy. Winter was still on the 
land when the body of John B. Gough was laid 
away to rest. Snow still draped the northern 
hills, and nature, like the orator, seemed dead. 
But spring was not far away. The buried forces 
of nature were sure soon to have their resurrec- 
tion and come forth amid all the beauty and song 
of a new world. There is no such catastrophe 
as death to a soul like that of John B. Gough. 

I recall his life of marvelous activity that 
gathered over eight thousand audiences, met 



Sunset-time. 189 

over eight millions of auditors, and to see 
them face to face he was a pilgrim with a record 
of half a million of miles of travel. By means 
of his books, as well as his addresses, he found 
and captured audiences every-where. It has 
been claimed that over a million copies of his 
lectures have been sold, and over a hundred 
thousand of his autobiography. His last book, 
Platform Echoes, had a very flattering recep- 
tion. In all these ways the fervid, magnetic 
orator still speaks. While in his handling of 
many themes he has flashed sparkles out of 
them, making his discussions both useful and 
entertaining, his greatest measure of influence 
accompanies that noble cause of which he once 
said, " While I can talk against the drink, I'll 
talk, and when I can only whisper, I'll do that, 
and when I can't w T hisper " — what then would 
he do ? " I'll make motions. They say I'm 
good at that ! " 

Can such a spirit be written down as dead ? 

He is God's true knight of temperance, still 
living, still riding against the foe, still striking 
hard and smiting sore that ugly dragon, Drink. 

THE END. 



